


cras credemus, hodie nihil

by morpholomeg



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, it takes more than one person to build trust, or a home, pretentious latin titles make everything deeper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 14:49:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4629282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morpholomeg/pseuds/morpholomeg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It takes several weeks before the Avengers all agree to move in properly to the Tower, long after Tony ostentatiously removes the defunct remains of S, T, R and K from its upper levels. It’s odd how nervous that leaves Pepper feeling."</p><p>Later, "Natasha wonders if Clint counts as the second or the third to leave, if Thor took first position from Pepper when he left with Loki. He never lived here though."</p><p>or: bridging the gap from Phase One to Phase Two, through the lens of Pepper Potts and Natasha Romanoff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ab extra

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by the wonderful Michelle, thatsmistertoyou.
> 
> Warnings for mentions of PTSD, alcoholism, and brainwashing. Also canon-typical violence and Hydra characters before anyone knew they were Hydra.

The day after the Expo, Pepper turns up to work as normal. At this point, she really does intend to give up on being CEO, but for the moment there’s no one else to fill the gap - she’s certainly not pushing it all back onto Tony - and there’s a job to be done.

It surprises her very much to see that Natalie Rushman has done the same.

“Ms Potts!” she says, before Pepper can get a word in. “May I have a word? I’m so sorry to bother you at a time like this, but -”

“Of course,” Pepper replies. “Come into my office for a minute?”

As soon as the door closes behind her, Natalie’s whole demeanour changes. She had seemed somewhat flustered, understandable given the night she’d had, but now she’s - still. Flat. She seems heavier somehow, although her posture remains just as upright.

“Agent Romanoff,” Pepper says.

Romanoff nods at the name. “I’m leaving today,” she says, and her voice is lower too. “If you could put it about that Ms Rushman quit after the stress of last night’s events, that would be useful to me. I realise that she would normally need to give notice, but I doubt you would impose.”

“I would have told her that her notice could have been served as paid leave, if she were that affected,” Pepper confirms.

“Good.”

There’s a moment where Pepper isn’t quite sure what to say. She feels an odd urge to apologise to Romanoff for the inconvenience of having to spy on her and Tony, or at least for accusing her of wanting to seduce Tony in order to supplant Pepper, but it has already been made abundantly clear that Romanoff is not Natalie, and so she doesn’t.

“I can stay for today,” Romanoff says. “It would be cruel to leave you without an assistant given the circumstances. Your filing or scheduling systems haven’t really changed since I took the job, but I can write up a quick guide for your next PA if you need it.”

Pepper blinks at that. “That’s… remarkably selfless of you.”

Romanoff smirks. “Never burn a cover unless you have to.”

But that makes Pepper flinch, though she tries not to show it. She used to think that spies and assassins only preyed on dangerous people, on people who were somehow threats. She’ll concede that Tony could be dangerous if he tried, but she has never questioned that he is one of the good guys. For that matter, she has never considered herself to be someone who might need SHIELD observing her. It’s like the first time she was out walking with black friends at college, and she realised that the police could be an enemy rather than a helping hand, depending entirely on who you happened to be.

“I see,” she says. She doesn’t ask if Romanoff predicts a return to Stark Industries. She’s already vowing to herself that if it does happen, it will be on her own terms. “Well then, if you wouldn’t mind attaching yourself to the PR and communications section of things today. Tony can take care of himself, and I’ll no doubt be in meetings with the board all day.”

The woman’s shoulders settle backwards, her chin lifts slightly, and by the time she finishes speaking, Pepper knows she’s talking to Natalie Rushman.

“Thank you,” she finishes, but she doesn’t know if she’s addressing her PA for sorting through media requests or the agent for saving her boyfriend’s life.

“Will that be all, Ms Potts?”

Pepper suppresses a shiver. “That will be all, Ms Rushman.”

***

In the weeks that follow, Pepper gradually forgets that she had wanted to give up on being the CEO of Stark Industries. She genuinely cares about this company, has had a massive part in shaping it since Tony’s return from Afghanistan. It feels like it’s hers, and when all is said and done, there’s no one else she would trust with it. The top levels of administration continue to shuffle themselves dramatically, the changes ricocheting down the hierarchy. Clean energy is their new primary focus, but Pepper has finally convinced Tony to make some of his personal tech available commercially now that he’s not selling his computer systems to the military, so R&D is like a circus on the best of days, Marketing is learning whole new markets, and how could she leave at a time like this? She throws herself into it wholeheartedly, taking too much on and loving it. Stark Tower is a triumph of PR as well as engineering, and when it lights up, she finally begins to feel like she's truly on top of the new Stark Industries.

And then a portal opens above Manhattan.

On that plane, Pepper’s world narrows to the television screen in front of her. All three of her phones are buzzing insistently at her, but damn them all, everything can wait until the world is either saved or destroyed, and Tony with it (she might never forgive herself for missing his call), and then it’s over, and her world expands abruptly to encompass clean-up, contracts, the company, but her heart is beating iambic, _Tony Tony Tony_.

As soon as he falls, she’s snatching up her phone - twenty seven missed calls, damn them all - and calling speed dial one, _Tony,_ god, she knows he’s unconscious, can’t stop herself anyway, can’t help it. The phone rings and rings and rings - she never expected anything else - she puts it down, calls speed dial three, JARVIS.

“Good afternoon Miss Potts,” he says calmly.

It’s at times like this that Pepper wonders if the AI is simply lacking in human emotion, or if Jarvis the human butler were so unflappable too. “JARVIS, is Tony alive?” she asks.

“Indeed he is,” he says, and a layer of her consciousness melts. “Would you like an update as to his health?”

“Yes,” she demands.

“Sir has likely cracked ribs, severe bruising, and was deprived of oxygen for approximately two minutes. He is to be transferred to a SHIELD medical team, however. I beg your pardon Miss Potts, that information is outdated; he is in the care of the Avengers Initiative.”

JARVIS is realtime wherever Tony’s tech is; he must have just argued his way out of a trip to hospital.

“Thank you, JARVIS. Would you send updates on his location to this phone, please, from now until I see him in person.”

“Of course, Miss Potts,” he says, and she revises her earlier opinion of him lacking human emotion. JARVIS wants Tony safe and cared for as much as she does. “Would you care to speak to him now?”

“Yes, of course - can he?”

But the next voice she hears is Tony’s. “Pepper! Pep, you okay? Why didn’t you pick up?”

“Of course I am - pick up? Oh my god, did you try to call me?”

“Yes! From outer space, you couldn’t spare a moment?”

“I didn’t see, I was watching you on the television flying into outer space!”

He sniffs; she hears it despite the noise that must surround him. “Okay, fair point. Listen, me and the guys, the team, we have to go get Loki, but we’re getting shawarma after, and you’re coming to New York, yeah? The Tower?”

She knows beyond all doubt that New York airspace is closed, that the roads will be impassable. “I’ll be there by tonight.”

“Yeah, you gotta meet Captain America,” he says. “And Bruce Banner - Dr Bruce Banner, Pep! And hey, turns out Natalie Rushman’s useful if you want her for killing aliens.”

“Natalie - Agent Romanoff? I didn’t see -”

“Yeah, she’s here. Might have to forgive her for the neck stabbing thing. Hey - hey, Hawkeye! That’s the name, right? Pep, I have to -”

“Go,” she tells him. “I’ll see you soon.”

“I’m bringing superheroes. We’ll have a sleepover. Pepper -”

“I’ll be with you soon,” she says again.

“Love you,” he says, quickly, and then he’s gone.

Pepper gives herself three seconds, eyes closed, breathing deep, and then pulls herself forcefully back together. She stalks into the cockpit and demands, “How close can we get to New York?”

~

They land hours away from New York, of course, but Pepper heaves all of her corporate weight to get a car in as far as she can go, and then cycles on high heels and an abandoned bicycle to the Tower. It’s night now, and the city that never sleeps is suffering from a patchy power supply. It bristles, uneasy, and its inhabitants scurry through its streets, burrowing their way back to homes which may no longer exist. Part of Pepper is already calculating just how much Stark Industries can donate to the reconstruction, and how much they'll have to donate to stay on the press's good side. The poor PR department - and these poor people - and the poor superheroes, most of whom surely don't have Tony's resources and who will have no idea how to deal with being held accountable...

Stark Tower is miraculously unscathed, at least. The logo has been mostly demolished, but it has power and there doesn't seem to be too much visible damage. She thinks she can make out a broken window on one of the higher levels, but it's impossible to tell which from down here. The lobby doors slide open as smoothly as they ever did, and if it weren't for the lack of staff it would seem like any other late night return. She waits until she's in the private elevator to take off her shoes, now slightly bloody from burst blisters.

"Welcome back, Miss Potts."

"Thank you, JARVIS. Where's Tony?"

"Sir is on the penthouse level, although in the interior bedroom." The elevator starts moving without her having to request to be taken there. "There was a slight issue with the integrity of the south-facing windows."

Pepper closes her eyes. "Something crashed through them?"

"As you say, Miss Potts."

The elevator slows. "Oh, JARVIS, before you let me out, who else is there? Here?"

"Dr Banner is asleep in the blue guest suite and Captain Rogers is in the green suite. Mr Odinsson has returned to SHIELD to oversee his brother's containment, and the location of Agents Romanoff and Barton is currently unknown."

"But they're not in the Tower?"

"Not that I am aware."

It's an uncharacteristic response from JARVIS, who rarely gives an impression that he is anything less than all-seeing. Pepper takes it that some of his cameras might have been damaged, but feels fairly safe in assuming that she won't be running into Agents Romanoff and Barton tonight.

She finds Tony in the normally unused bedroom towards the centre of the Tower, sound asleep. His hair is damp but clean, he's dressed in fresh sleepwear and someone has even taped up his ribs. A tablet lies a few inches from his left hand.

Pepper allows herself a minute just to look at him before heading into the bathroom to clean herself up. There are none of her normal products in here, just generically expensive soap and shampoo, but the hot water is still a relief, and there's a first aid kit so she can patch up her feet. She investigates the closet quietly and finds a t-shirt of Tony's and some boxer shorts to sleep in and then finally, finally, she slips into bed and goes to sleep.

~

It takes several weeks before the Avengers all agree to move in properly to the Tower, long after Tony ostentatiously removes the defunct remains of S, T, R and K from its upper levels. Captain Rogers’ old apartment was destroyed in the battle, as it turns out, and Dr Banner really didn’t have anywhere else to go, but Agents Barton and Romanoff drop off the radar immediately after Thor takes Loki back to Asgard, leaving this half-forged team at half power.

It’s odd how nervous that leaves Pepper feeling, but she’s always believed that life only throws at you what is survivable. Irrational as it may be, she can’t help but notice that the alien god with his army only attacked once Tony had created Iron Man, Captain America had been reawoken, Dr Banner had turned himself into the Hulk, and so on and so forth. If only one of the Avengers had been unavailable then the battle might have gone very differently.

Still, she tamps down those feelings. They're irrational and, on balance, unimportant. What is important to her is that Tony is happy.

Six weeks after the battle, she comes back from a trip to Malibu near two in the morning to find Tony in his workshop. Thus far, thus unusual, but he's there with Captain Rogers, who seems to be sculpting with holograms. He looks up at her approach, sweeps his sculpture to the side with a single precise movement and stands straight. Tony, engulfed in a cloud of sparks down the far end of the 'shop, doesn't seem to notice.

"Miss Potts," Captain Rogers says warmly.

"Captain," she smiles. "How are you?"

"Very well, thank you, ma'am," he says.

Given the time of day, she suspects that's a lie, but chooses to let it go. "I've told you before, you don't have to call me ma'am."

He actually ducks his head at that. "I'll try," he says, then turns away to call, "Hey, Tony!"

Wonder of wonders, he does actually look up, ripping off his goggles as the sparks die out. "Pepper!" he crows. "You're back!"

"And people call him a genius," Pepper mutters conspiratorially to Captain Rogers, who grins, but then Tony has come bounding over to sweep her up into a deliciously thorough kiss. By the time that they break apart, the captain's virtual sculpture has been switched off and the man himself has quietly left.

"What was he doing here?" Pepper asks.

Tony runs a hand through his hair, leaving it a haphazard mess. "I get the feeling he's got PTSD, which, y'know, given the last thing he remembers doing in the forties is committing suicide by crashing a plane full of nuclear weapons, fair enough - anyway, we've sort of got an insomniac club set up. Whoever's awake and in need of company. Madam the Black Widow has yet to join us, but Hawkeye's good for blowing stuff up at all hours."

"They've moved in then?"

"Oh yeah, turned up a couple of days ago? I think. Steve says Barton needed time out after the whole being possessed thing, went to chill with Widow." He lowers his voice, despite there being no one around. “Ever occur to you that an archer and a cellist both play with bows?”

Pepper blinks rapidly, a tell she really must learn to suppress. Had Phil ever specified pronouns when he was talking about his partner? She’s sure he did, but is that just her internalised heteronormativity at play?

“Current tactic as suggested by Bruce is aggressively not mentioning Coulson for the moment,” he goes on. “Which, normally I wouldn’t bother, but I’m pretty sure Natasha would actually kill me in my sleep, so.”

“Well, then.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Tony, and pulls her in for another kiss.

Pepper lets herself melt into it a little, almost consciously letting go of her public persona for the day. “I’m going up to bed,” she says. “Are you…?”

But the reminder has him glancing towards the back of the workshop again. “I’m nearly done,” he claims. “It’s Natasha’s taser wrist-thingies - I said I’d get the recharge time down to half a second by the time she went out on another mission, except she’s going tomorrow and I reckon I can get it down to a quarter if I just reroute -”

“Alright,” she interrupts. “I’ll be asleep when you come up, though, so don’t you dare wake me.”

He clicks his heels and salutes. “Yes, ma’am.”

She laughs at his impression and leaves him be. It’s nearly a quarter to three by the time she finally slips into bed, and she isn’t particularly surprised when she wakes up alone at six. Still, she doesn’t feel it unreasonable to ask, “JARVIS, where’s Tony?”

“He is in the communal kitchen area with Agent Romanoff,” he tells her.

“He got those bracelets done then?”

“Indeed. The recharge time is now slightly less than a tenth of a second.”

She showers, dresses, and applies her make-up - heavy on the concealer, light on the lipstick today, in deference to her lack of sleep and to breakfast and lunch meetings. Her hair she pins up and fixes with a hefty spritz of hairspray; she won’t have time to touch it up. By the time she makes it down to the kitchen, Tony is alone and having a staring contest with the coffee-maker.

“No,” she tells him. He blinks sleepily at her. “Go to bed.”

“Yeah,” he says, and it’s amazing how much he changes once he lets himself reach a stopping point. All that electric energy has dissipated, gone with his creation, and now he’s a rumbling mess of tiredness. “You don’t need me to…”

“Not today.” It’s not even a lie. R&D has enough to be getting on with, adapting Tony’s OSes and personal tablets for marketing purposes, and there’s nothing in particular he needs to sign off on as majority owner of the company.

He yawns. “Good. Night, Pep.”

He goes to bed just as Pepper leaves to begin her day.

~

For the most part, the Avengers exist on a very different plane to Pepper. They don’t get called out as a team very often - certainly if it were her initiative, she would only use them in cases of actual alien invasions - but as time goes on and they learn to work together, SHIELD starts deploying them against other vaguely bizarre threats. Today, only their third venture as a team, it’s a massive robot stomping its way through Philadelphia, and for the first time, Pepper isn’t particularly worried. She’s scared to death, of course, but this time at least her rational mind is relatively certain of a victory. It’s a robot, and if there’s one thing that Tony Stark can certainly deal with, it’s robots. After all, he deals with Dummy on a daily basis.

After the event, she rather wishes she hadn’t been so sure.

As much as she’d love to spend her time glued to the television - no, that’s the wrong verb. She wouldn’t love it, but she feels somehow like she needs to. Either way, she can’t, not just because it would set a precedent, but because Stark Industries is moving into a very precarious stage of seeking out international business deals which just weren’t open to them when they were making weapons. Today’s fight is trying to make overtures to the Russian IT security sector, showing off Tony’s OSes and encryption systems, but in order to do that, she first has to understand the market. She’s neck deep in research, in fording first contact and trying to be as gracious and as open as possible. She has seven tabs open about various aspects of Russian culture: honorifics, names, a quick post-Cold War history and so on. She does have a translation agency contracted, but it’s always best to know some things oneself; she’ll never forgive herself for letting Tony meet a Chinese trade representative without first ensuring that he knew that the surname came first.

So she’s embroiled in all of this cultural research as well as statistical analysis when a secretary knocks on the door, and rather than waiting, barges right in.

Pepper raises an eyebrow. “Yes, Thomas?”

“The Avengers - I’m sorry, we had the news feed on in the outer office - Mr Stark has been hurt and we thought -”

She doesn’t clap a hand to her mouth, doesn’t panic. “Thank you, Thomas. Seriously hurt? Has he been taken to hospital?”

"We don't know ma'am, would you - you could come out and watch."

Pepper knows she shouldn't, knows she can't set a precedent of abandoning the company every time the Avengers get called out, but if Tony's already been hurt... "Yes. I'm coming." She grabs her personal cell as she goes, already thinking to call JARVIS if his servers aren't completely taken up with the Iron Man suit.

But as she gets out into the outer office, she's met with half her secretarial staff and a third of the IT technicians from the floor below gasping with laughter and relief. Pepper's head is reeling. She spots her PR coordinator near the back of the group. "Lara! What's happening, where's Iron Man?"

Lara turns to her with all the implacable calm that Pepper hired her for. "He fell at the same time the robot went down. None of the others showing significant signs of injury."

"Looks like an EMP," one of the technicians puts in. "I don't think it was Mr Stark who set it off though - he was up way too high for that to be safe."

"What, you think the Black Widow carries EMP equipment somewhere in that tiny catsuit?"

The speaker is a genius, unfortunately, the guy who's been heading up the team adapting Tony's coding for commercial purposes. Pepper rather hates him.

"Mr Sanderson, if you could hold back on the sexist remarks about Mr Stark’s teammates, that would be appreciated,” she says loudly. “As far as I can see, the show seems to be over, and I’m sure I’ll receive news about Mr Stark’s condition soon enough. If everyone would kindly return to work.”

She waits for people to begin dispersing, and then catches Lara’s arm. “I’ll get an update to you as soon as possible.”

“Appreciated,” she says, and then leaves Pepper to stalk back into her office wait for news.

The thing is, she supposes, that JARVIS would normally remind Tony to call her, and she doesn't know if either one of them is available to do so this time. She credits herself with admirable patience for giving Tony or JARVIS or anyone at all five minutes to contact her, and then hits speed dial three.

“Good afternoon, Miss Potts.”

“JARVIS, what’s Tony’s status?”

“I’m afraid I’m uncertain on that point, Miss Potts. The Iron Man suit was taken down by an electromagnetic pulse, as were the communicative devices carried by the other Avengers, and as such I am unable to directly monitor or contact sir at this point.”

He actually sounds unnerved. Pepper resists the temptation to run a hand through her hair; she has a three o’clock. “Do you know where he might be? Can you check the news, social media?” She screws her eyes shut. “SHIELD communications?”

“One moment, Miss Potts.”

Pepper is prepared to wait, but JARVIS is gratifyingly literal; he resumes speaking almost immediately.

“Social media suggest that the Avengers left Philadelphia via the quinjet; Captain Rogers has been photographed from several different angles carrying sir onboard. The suit appears to be locked into the position it was in at the time that the electromagnetic pulse hit. The quinjet is chartered to return to the Helicarrier. I cannot find any more detailed communications about sir’s status, I’m afraid.”

Pepper is fairly sure that she and JARVIS just broke a law or two there. She finds she doesn’t really care. “Thank you, JARVIS. Could you place a call to -”

But there she pauses. To whom? Going straight to the mythical Director Fury would be firstly impossible and secondly an irritation in the eyes of SHIELD, which she would rather avoid. The Avengers don’t have a regular contact at SHIELD outside of Agents Romanoff and Barton themselves, and their comms have been taken out by EMP. Pepper doesn’t actually know anyone else there.

“If I might make a suggestion, madam, Agent Jasper Sitwell was a compatriot of Agent Coulson, with similar clearance levels, and is currently logged onto the computer system.”

“Alright then,” Pepper says.

The call is picked up after a few seconds. “Hello?”

“Good afternoon, is this Agent Sitwell?”

“Who am I speaking to?”

She takes that as the SHIELD version of yes. “This is Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries. I hope I’m not bothering you, but -”

“Actually, Ms Potts, we are kind of busy here. How did you get this number?”

Pepper sorely hopes the man is just ignorant, rather than downright rude. “I did mention that I’m the CEO of Stark Industries. I won’t take up much of your time, I just need to know if Tony Stark is alright.”

“You mean you can hack into internal SHIELD phone lines but you don’t know how Iron Man is.”

“The Avengers’ electronic communications systems were taken out during the fight. Agent Sitwell, I must insist.”

“Right, right, sorry, give me a second.”

“Thank you,” she says, as forcefully as she can manage under the circumstances. SHIELD does not have hold music, as it turns out, so she waits in silence. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees an IM pop up from Lara, but doesn't look to read it.

The line reconnects. "I'm putting you through to medical," Sitwell says, and before she can thank him, she's hearing the phone ring again.

"Come on, come on," she mutters.

"Is this Miss Potts?"

Thank goodness. "Yes it is. Is this Agent Barton?"

"Yep. Hey, Tony's alive, first off. He got knocked out when he fell - I guess you saw on TV?"

"Yes," she says, for the sake of moving the conversation faster. "But he's alright?"

"We're not sure yet. He is awake, but he's got a bit of a concussion and they're still trying to get him out the suit so we don’t really know if it’s just bruising or something else."

Pepper tries to shut down her panic. He’s reporting honestly and concisely, but in a way she wishes he’d respect her a little bit less, treat her more like a frightened girlfriend than a CEO. She doesn’t need the plain facts and nothing more; she needs a realistic prediction of when he can come home. “Right. Can I - I need to be there with him.”

“Miss Potts, we’re on the Helicarrier. You don’t have - shit, I’ll see what we can swing, Captain America’s gotta be good for something.”

“No, don’t worry about it,” she says immediately. “I’m sure you have more important things to be worried about.”

“I appreciate that, ma’am,” says Barton. “Meantime, d’you want me to see if I can get you on speaker in the actual room? Nat’s a decent hacker - hey, Nat! Got Miss Potts here, wants to speak to Tony, can we route this call through the intercom?”

“Actually,” Pepper says, “I can probably just ask, if he’s traced your location - JARVIS, can you route this call through the intercom of Tony’s hospital room?”

“Naturally, Miss Potts,” he responds.

Pepper has no idea what microphones he’s tapping into, but almost immediately she’s treated to Tony’s voice, slightly slurred, quite strained, but definitely Tony’s voice.

"Shit, that hurts. Ugh, shit, my spine."

"Tony!" she almost shouts. "Tony, it's Pepper, it's Pepper, are you alright?"

"Oh wow, Pep. Hey, I didn't call you. I would have called you."

She laughs in relief. "I know you would, sweetie. Who’s with you now?"

“There’s a nurse but it’s okay because Cap’s here - say hi, Cap?”

“Uh, hello, Ms Potts.”

He must be confused by the line about the nurse. Pepper decides not to explain it. “Hello, Captain.”

“And I think everyone else is around here somewhere - did Brucey-boy wake up yet? Did we find him?”

“We got him,” says Captain Rogers in a soothing voice. “Everyone’s alright, Tony.”

“Oh, good.” He grunts in pain. “Shit. No head movements. You hear that, Pep? We’re okay, you can go back to work.”

“Now if only I could ever get you to take that advice,” she teases.

“Shh,” he hisses.

Pepper shakes her head. “Captain Rogers, how is he, really? And is there anything I can do for you?”

“I think he really is alright, ma’am. He’s in pain but as far as we can work out, the suit protected him quite a lot. I don’t think we’re gonna find any broken bones, just jarred his back and hit his head.”

“Bruised ribs again, maybe,” says a new voice. The aforementioned nurse. She sounds rather severe, but perhaps that’s to be expected; she does work for SHIELD. “We’ve given him oral painkillers, but we’re still waiting for them to take effect. He assures us the suit will reboot and let him out soon.”

“Arc reactor only blinked,” Tony confirms. “It’s just that half the wiring in the chest piece got kind of fried cos the reactor overloaded, what with the pulse, and - okay, you do not need to know details, but the point is I’m fine.”

It would be more believable if he doesn’t immediately follow it up with cursing a blue streak.

“Okay, Mr Stark, let’s try to minimise on the movement, shall we?” says the nurse. “For the moment, just try to stay still and stop talking.”

“That’s kinda difficult for him,” Captain Rogers mutters.

“Fuck off,” says Tony. Pepper braces herself to intervene, but -

“Hey, sorry, I’m just teasing,” says Captain Rogers. “Nurse Cohen’s got a point there though. We got you, you just have to lie there.”

“Fuck off,” Tony repeats, but it’s not biting this time, just a rote repetition. “Pep. See you later.”

She wants to end the conversation with some sort of well-wish, like ‘be safe’ or ‘get well soon’ or even ‘I love you’, but none of them feel appropriate.

“Okay,” she says simply. And then she blurts out, “I wish I could be there with you.”

“You heard, Captain America’s got me,” Tony says. “Steve Rogers, only possible substitute for Virginia Potts.”

She laughs. “I’ll see you later, Mr Stark,” she says, voice deliberately light and teasing.

“You too, Ms Potts.”

Just before JARVIS disconnects the call, she hears Captain Rogers say, “Virginia?”

~

It strikes her as unreasonably funny that the entire business world - indeed, almost the entire world altogether - knows her as Pepper Potts, and only very few are aware that her parents named her Virginia. ‘Pepper’ started off as a nickname Tony had given her, back when she had first been hired and he was doing his level best to get rid of her, and then over the years it became, quite simply, her name. She doesn’t have much in the way of family nowadays, and it always pricks at her when a cousin sends her a Christmas card addressed to ‘Ginny’. That name doesn’t feel quite real to her any more. Really, she’s quite happy to leave it behind if it will stop journalists getting too curious about her past; more than one editorialist has described her as ‘coming out of nowhere’, and she much prefers that moniker to what they would inevitably write about her single-parent home, her mediocre school record, and her mother’s early death.

Phil Coulson had known every variation of her name, of course, and unlike most people had asked what she preferred. “Oh, call me Pepper,” she’d smiled. “It’s what everyone else calls me, after all.”

He had nodded politely and left the matter be. Only weeks later did he pick up the topic again. She’d been attempting to wheedle the name of his cellist out of him over a glass of wine, and he’d refused as gracefully as royalty, polite but not apologetic. “Until I joined SHIELD, I never thought too much about names,” he said. “Most people are given one by their parents, pick up their father’s last name, and then stay with it their entire life. And a rose would smell as sweet, et cetera.”

Pepper, slightly surprised by his uncharacteristic verbosity, gestured at him to go on.

He sighed at his own weakness. “But by virtue of being so attached to people, they come to mean the world. Your Mr Stark and his statement - I should have known he wouldn’t deny that. I have operatives who insisted on picking their own codenames, things which are hardly code at all for anyone who cared to Google them… Anyway.”

“I did wonder about Agent Romanoff keeping the initials,” Pepper admitted.

He had smiled but had not taken the opportunity to elaborate. “So why do you keep Pepper? I would have imagined Virginia suiting a businesswoman far better.”

She set down her wineglass, stroking fingers down the stem. “Well, it grants me a certain amount of anonymity. But it feels natural now. I automatically introduce myself as Pepper, I think of myself as Pepper… Really, it’s probably nothing more than habit at this stage. The fact that Tony essentially changed my name never bothered me in the first place.”

“And that’s where you and I are lucky,” he’d said.

She knows now that he was talking about Clint when he mentioned an operative insisting on picking his own codename; she has, of course, Googled all of the Avengers in lieu of actually being given information about them. She could ask Tony for access to their files, but that seems inordinately rude and intrusive. Searches on ‘Natasha Romanoff’ turn up suspiciously blank results, with ‘Black Widow’ just producing pictures of spiders, ‘Bruce Banner’ is mostly connected to academic papers, and ‘Steve Rogers’ is practically useless compared to ‘Captain America’, but a search for ‘Hawkeye’ turns up a circus performer known as the Amazing Hawkeye, famed for his skills with a bow, and a quick diversion into Avengers fansites reveals that many others have made the connection. They don’t know Clint’s name, though. In fact, the only two Avengers who are consistently known by both name and codename are Tony and Captain Rogers, and even then they tend to write more about Captain America.

The most powerful people on Earth, and no one knows anything about them, not even their names.

Pepper can empathise.

~

For months, she tries to be gracious about the presence of the Avengers in her home. Most of the time, she even succeeds. None of them are exactly difficult to live with; Captain Rogers is unfailingly (if slightly worryingly) polite, Dr Banner and Agent Barton keep to themselves, as far as she can tell, and Agent Romanoff has so far managed to avoid her entirely. The problem is that it’s like living in a college dorm again; she may like the people living around her, but they aren’t family. They aren’t home. She can’t relax in front of these people, and they don’t relax in front of her.

To be fair, she doesn’t know if they relax in front of each other either. Tony tells her some things - Bruce quietly suggested a team movie night, ostensibly for the education of Steve and they’re going to watch Star Wars which is going to be hilarious, Pep, are you sure you have to go to Malibu? - but she’s in and out of New York, darting all over the world trying to capitalise on Stark Industry’s growing construction business in the wake of the New York catastrophe - there’s only so much aid they can generously donate before they have to start monetising it - as well as keeping up with the software and security deals, and 2012 is turning out to be the most exhausting year she’s lived through, and she lived through 2008 and the creation of Iron Man. The last time she slept in the same bed as Tony was six weeks ago.

Still, this is how life is now, and Pepper is nothing if not capable. She has lived her life believing that much is implausible, but very little is impossible. Living with the Avengers may be implausible, but she’s determined that it will not become impossible.

It’s a cup of coffee that breaks her.

Natalie Rushman drank tea, mostly, a particular Russian blend which she had confessed to having imported.

“It was a silly habit I picked up in college,” she had told Pepper one day. “Every time I did well on a paper, I bought a new kind of tea to try out. Took me until my senior year to pick this one as my favourite, but then I moved away and could never find it in another store. So I ended up looking online - really, I told you it was silly.”

In the mornings, though, she had drunk coffee just like every other office worker, albeit with a hefty amount of cream and two sugars. Pepper had known this, had made sure whenever Natalie was called in for an early meeting made necessary by time zone clashes that there was a cup of coffee with cream and two sugars waiting for her. It was her little way of apologising for Natalie having to put up with the odd hours, and occasionally with Tony.

On Thanksgiving morning 2012, Pepper returns to Avengers Tower at 4:36am. It’s a wonder she’s back in time for the holiday, quite frankly - she had been finalising a deal in Tokyo, where American Thanksgiving is little known and less cared for. Still, she’s made it back, and she knows that Captain Rogers is planning a team Thanksgiving dinner to which she is invited later, and she’s genuinely looking forward to a day off, a day at home.

It’s this sentiment which has her going to the communal kitchen to acquire some coffee, rather than heading straight up to the penthouse. Thanksgiving is a time for sociability, for being with people, even if the ridiculously early hour makes it highly unlikely that she’ll run into anyone. It’s a symbolic gesture at heart, but all the same -

“Oh! Agent Romanoff. I didn’t expect anyone to be awake.”

She’s sitting on a stool by the window. The lights are off, but the glow from the streets below is enough to illuminate her; scarlet hair is leached of colour to become grey, and then retinted a glowing orange by the streetlamps. Her face is turned towards the doorway before Pepper speaks, probably having heard her footsteps. When Pepper flicks the lights on, Natasha smiles, and immediately it’s strange because that’s not the smile that she’s used to seeing on that face. Pepper has seen many smiles on Ms Rushman’s face, but none of them were the sardonic half-smirk she now sees on Agent Romanoff’s.

“I’m on European time,” she offers, but doesn’t explain why that might be.

“I’m on Japanese,” Pepper returns. “I’m going to have to power through this one, I think.”

Natasha inclines her head in a non-answer, and they fall silent for a terrible, awkward moment.

“Anyway, I was going to make some coffee - would you like a cup?”

“Thank you,” says Natasha. “One sugar.”

“Oh, you’ve cut down,” says Pepper, turning the machine on.

To another person, this would be an invitation to talk about their diet, or the quality of Tony Stark’s personal coffee machine (infinitely superior and far quicker than the ones available to regular members of staff). But to Natasha Romanoff…

“No,” she says. “Natalie Rushman took two sugars. I’ve always taken one, if I had the choice.”

Pepper blinks. “Ah,” she says weakly.

It’s an odd reminder that the woman before her both was and was not her personal assistant for weeks.

Natasha slides off her chair. “I won’t apologise,” she warns. “I was doing my job.”

“Oh no, I understand,” Pepper assures her.

“But you don’t forgive me,” Natasha notes.

The coffee machine clicks off.

“Well, I’m sure there’s nothing to forgive,” Pepper smiles.

She moves out of the Tower six hours later.

~

“What the hell, Pep?” Tony demands, four hours after that, storming into her living room. “I thought I was the one who did stupid impulsive things.”

The apartment is one she bought back when she was Tony’s ridiculously overpaid PA, when their base of operations was in Malibu and Stark Tower hadn’t been built yet. Tony did technically own a mansion on Park Avenue, but it was the Stark family property and Pepper didn’t like it there. Having her own Manhattan apartment had been a good idea, a good investment, and she’s used it a fair amount over the past few years. It doesn’t feel particularly lived in, but the furniture and decorations are all her work, or at least her design. It’s big and airy, modern without being too futuristic. Tony, as far as she is aware, has never visited the place, doesn’t know its address, and certainly doesn’t have a key.

Still, she doesn’t bother to ask how he got in. “This is a sensible impulsive decision,” she counters. “And it’s not even that impulsive.”

“You were coming to Thanksgiving dinner,” he points out. “I know you were, because you reminded me about it seven times in the last two days. Plus, Steve said you told him you were coming, and no one lies to Captain America.”

“I’m still coming to Thanksgiving dinner,” she assures him. “I’ll just be coming back here afterwards.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” he asks, demands really, focusing all his intensity on her. She wonders how long she could make that last, and then sighs.

“Tony, we haven’t been together in three months.”

He gapes. “Uh, yes we have. I mean, we haven’t had sex -”

“- you know that’s not what I -”

“- but we are so together, Pep,” he insists. “What, you think we can’t do long distance or something?”

“Tony…”

“Okay, new question, do you actually want to break up with me?”

“Of course not!” she protests.

“So we’re not broken up,” he shrugs. “No, listen to me. If you don’t want to be in a relationship with me, that’s fine, that’s cool. But if you do, and obviously so do I, then we just have to work at it more, right?”

She blinks rapidly. “Even if that means I need my own space?”

“Even if that means you need your own space,” he says, easy as anything. He takes a step forward, picks up her hand and swings it between them. “Look, I know you don’t want to live full time with the team, I get that. But I can’t turn them out. Barton seems to have some other base, and who even knows if Thor’s ever coming back, but Rogers? Banner? I can’t do that to them, Pep.”

“I’m not asking you to,” she says firmly. “You know I wouldn’t ask that.”

“Yeah, because you’re amazing,” he says, and twirls her. She shrieks, nearly overbalancing, but she’s laughing as she comes back round to face him.

“Speak for yourself,” she says fondly. “I don’t know why I forget that you can pay attention when you want to.”

“Because I practically never apply those skills to personal relationships and you know it? I do pay attention to you, Pepper.”

“I know you do,” she says.

“Just promise me you’ll still be around?” he says. “I know you have to be in Malibu a lot - hey, do you want the Malibu house? I could transfer that into your -”

“Not happening,” she interrupts, and he switches tack immediately:

“- and promise me you won’t stop coming around to the Tower just cos Natasha’s there.”

“What? No, of course not -”

“- and on that note, when are you going to hire a new PA?”

She blinks, flustered. “She was never my PA, Tony, I’ve never had a PA.”

“Bullshit, she was working more for you than me, she filtered your emails, ran your schedule -”

“- I am perfectly capable -”

“You’re the CEO! Sure you can manage your schedule, but you don’t have to! Look, I know I’m the single most privileged bastard on the planet, born with a silver spoon, but you have to take -”

“I know how a business hierarchy works, Tony!”

“Then why aren’t you using it?”

“I’ve - I’ve delegated to department heads, and I do still have other secretaries and assistants. Tony, I don’t want to talk about this.”

He throws up his hands. “Okay, fine, whatever. But you are coming over later.”

“Yes, I am. Now, I’m going to buy some groceries, so unless you want to come with me to Whole Foods -”

“Okay, okay, I get the message. I’ll see you at six.”

He kisses her on the cheek, beautifully light, and she takes a moment to reflect on how much he’s changed in four years. She remembers the asshole she worked for in 2007, and it’s not that he bears no resemblance to the man standing in front of her now - no, he’s still Tony Stark, but he’s… grown up.

She decides to put the criticism of her managerial skills to one side for now.

The opening to Thanksgiving dinner is still slightly awkward, but with a hefty dose of sincerity largely supplied by Captain Rogers - Steve, she should call him, now that she’s heard him say that he’s thankful for the home she helped provide - and a surprising amount of humour. It turns out that Dr Banner - Bruce - is quietly wicked, and even Steve has a beautifully dry wit, so understated that it’s easy to miss. The three boys tease each other over the things they’re thankful for, but never cruelly. They know each other enough to know what they can’t say, and what they can.

Clint hasn’t been around for a while; no one expects him. Natasha simply isn’t there.

“Are they with family?” Pepper asks as Tony helps himself to more potatoes.

He looks slightly baffled at the question. “Uh, they don’t have any. Right? We would know?"

Steve shrugs. "They're kind of private people."

"I don't know about Clint, but Natasha got given a last-minute mission in Paris," Bruce volunteers. "She left about three hours ago. Steve, really, have some more.”

“Anyway, you know Widow's Russian, right?” Tony continues. “Can't imagine her being big on Thanksgiving. Seriously, can we start eating now?”

Pepper had known that, due to a rather insensitive rant from Tony himself on the matter several months ago - “they didn’t just send a spy, they sent a Russian spy!” - and a faint memory of studying the Russian revolution in World History classes, where she might once have heard the name Romanov.

A slightly awkward silence sets in as they begin to eat. Pepper wracks her brain for a safe topic of conversation. She knows not to talk about the military with Bruce in the room, so mentioning Rhodey is out for the moment, she can’t talk about work with Tony at Thanksgiving dinner, and any and all questions she might have for Steve are probably completely insensitive.

Still, she isn’t a CEO for nothing. She turns resolutely to Bruce. “Tony tells me you were travelling in India before all of this happened,” she prompts.

“Oh, yes,” he says, and dutifully sets off on a series of charming anecdotes about Kolkata, and then Mumbai. Pepper knows beyond all doubt that he’s whitewashing the stories for the sake of the conversation, but she makes interested noises and happily encourages Steve to join in with stories of places he visited during the war, and again Pepper knows he’s editing severely.

By the end of the evening, she absolutely knows she’s made the right decision in moving out. It’s a perfectly pleasant occasion, but in front of her, none of them tell the truth about anything. She makes them less comfortable, if not actually uncomfortable, and they make her feel uneasy.

Three weeks later, Natasha knocks on her door.

Except - her hair has been straightened and swept back into a French twist. She’s wearing a pencil skirt, a chiffon blouse, and heels that stretch the boundaries of comfortable and of work-appropriate.

“Ms Rushman,” Pepper says. “What a surprise.”

Natalie smiles. “May I come in?”

As soon as the door is closed behind her, the act is dropped. Suddenly the heels are perfectly natural, the delicate eyeshadow incongruous with the steely look in her eyes. “There’s an assassination call out on you,” she tells Pepper. “Working on the basis that if SI lost its CEO and Tony Stark lost his girlfriend in one fell swoop, both would fall apart.”

She doesn’t doubt it. Pepper just nods sharply. “So you’re resuming the job as my PA in order to act as my bodyguard, I presume.”

This gets her an appreciative smirk, so different from Natalie’s pleasant smile.

“Fine,” she says. “The car’s coming in half an hour. Happy’s driving, so there’s no need to explain why he’s picking you up from my apartment. You can tell me your plan for explaining your lengthy absence to the rest of the staff on the way. In the meantime, would you like some coffee?”

“That would be lovely,” she says, and Pepper doesn’t know who’s answering, and so she asks:

“One sugar or two?”

The slow, considering look is all Natasha, but then she smiles prettily and says, “Two, please.”

~

The story to be given if asked for and not before is that Natalie’s resignation happened as a result of the situation at the Expo, which would be traumatising for any normal person, and that she spent the last two years working in an international IT corporation with Russian links. She’s returning to Stark Industries partly as a favour to Pepper, who has yet to hire a new PA, and partly because she’s been offered a pay raise if she’ll function as an interpreter for the new business deals, which are just about reaching the stage where emails become video conference calls. A little judicious editing of the impeccable background check and resumé Pepper had received when Tony first plucked Natalie out of legal ensures that Ms Rushman’s minor at college was in Russian, and that the gap in her CV is perfectly plugged.

Within a week, rumour has it that Ms Rushman is slightly nervous about Mr Stark, quite understandably given the situation in which she last saw him, and that Ms Potts has told him to stay out of the executive floors of the building because he’s upset quite enough of her staff, thank you very much.

“You’re convincing people that I’m unprotected,” she says to Natalie in the car on the way to a shareholder’s meeting.

“Yes,” says Natasha.

“You’re using me as bait to draw out the assassins.”

“Yes.”

Pepper does not have an eidetic memory, but it is exceptionally good. She thinks over the conversation she had with Natasha in her apartment the morning that this started. “I shouldn’t have presumed anything when it came to you.”

Natasha’s watching her with snakelike eyes. “You’re remarkably easy to lie to,” she says. “You never ask. Even when you had your doubts about Natalie Rushman’s motives, you never asked her what they were. You assumed, you researched, you even confronted her once, but you never actually asked.”

Pepper holds her gaze. “If I had asked Natalie Rushman about her intentions, I still wouldn’t have learned anything about Natasha Romanoff’s.”

Natasha concedes the point in silence, and Pepper doesn’t even trust that. She knows very little about Natasha, but she can be perfectly sure of one thing that both of them have in common: they like to be ahead of their conversational partner.

~

The assassins attack at Pepper’s apartment.

She’s ex-directory, of course, but the car picks her up and drops her off at the same building each day, and it doesn’t take a genius to watch the windows, or check the number on her mailbox, or however else they work out which apartment is hers.

She curses herself for not anticipating this. Where else would she be so vulnerable?

Later, she curses herself for not anticipating that of course she has a bodyguard in her non-working hours, too.

The first she knows of either is the arrow that misses her by a yard. It’s a particularly bad instinct that has her turning away from the open window where it must have entered to see instead where it has landed; in the eye of a woman dressed entirely in black, now lying on her kitchen floor, dying if not dead.

She lets out a half-voiced gasp, high-pitched but not shaking, and then she hears Natasha’s voice.

“Negative on further hostiles. Stick around for a couple of hours to be sure, though.” She steps into the kitchen, dressed in her catsuit, bristling with weapons and yet steady as a rock as she meets Pepper’s eyes. “No, I’ve got her.”

Pepper forcibly calms herself down. “Is that Clint?” she asks.

Natasha nods. “Understood,” she says. “Over and out.” She flicks a switch on the earpiece but leaves it in place, and only then looks down at the body. “Go take a shower,” she advises Pepper. “I’ll deal with this.”

She stays in the shower for longer than she normally would, although she suspects that Natasha can probably dispose of a body in less than ten minutes. She washes her hair, shaves her legs, moisturises, blow-dries her hair, straightens it…

She meets Natasha in the sitting room half an hour later, and Natasha raises an eyebrow at the smart-casual outfit and the minimal makeup. “And you worry about me putting on a role.”

“I realise that you almost get killed on a daily basis, but at least you tend to be fully aware of what’s going on,” Pepper says. She’s trying for angry, but thinks she’s probably not quite managing it.

Natasha shrugs. “You didn’t ask.”

“I assumed I wouldn’t get any answers. It’s not an unreasonable extrapolation from our previous patterns of communication.”

“You didn’t ask,” Natasha repeats.

“You didn’t apologise,” Pepper snaps.

Again, that slow, unfurling smile, and Pepper knows she’s been played.

“Leave,” she says.

There isn’t much to tell her that she’s surprised Natasha - the minutest widening of her eyes, the tiniest twitch of a muscle in her jaw - but it’s there.

“Now,” she insists. “Send Clint in if you think more people might come. But you can leave.”

She doesn’t know if she expects Natasha to argue, to ignore her, even to comply, but hasn’t she learned not to presume?

As it happens, Natasha puts her hand to her ear, and then says, “Hawkeye, switch places. No, I’m fine. This is Ms Potts’ request.”

Then she stands, turns, and leaves.

~

“So, please tell me how you and Nat are single-handedly reigniting the Cold War,” Clint says, after swinging in the kitchen window. Apparently coming up the stairs would have taken too long.

Pepper sighs. “I think we both have trust issues. That’s all.”

Clint snorts, now making a show of checking her apartment for - she presumes - sightlines, hiding places, entry and exit points. “Yeah, see, that would explain why you don’t like her. It definitely doesn’t explain why she actually cares about your reaction. Matter of fact, it doesn’t explain why she avoided you right up until you moved out of the Tower.”

It occurs to her as she watches him that Clint is a spy too. He’s less obvious about it than Natasha, or perhaps it’s just that he hasn’t had to turn those tricks on her before, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the same skillset available to him.

Pepper trails him into her bedroom, where he’s now checking her walk-in closet. “I’m not trying to hurt her,” she says.

“And yet I’m still giving you the shovel talk,” he says lightly. “Though I guess it’s been more of a show than tell.”

“I didn’t ask her to shadow me this week,” she points out.

“No, she took that job on herself,” Clint agrees. “You know this wasn’t a SHIELD-assigned mission? It could have been, if Nat had acted on the information she picked up by passing it onto our handler. I mean, you being you, Stark Industries having such close links with SHIELD - they’d have said yes.”

She sits down on the bed, exhausted. “I didn’t know that. I just…”

She just assumed. Yet again, she had just assumed, based on reasonable leaps of logic and observations of past behaviour, and still she had got it wrong.

Clint raises an eyebrow at her, now apparently satisfied that no one’s going to leap out of a shadowy corner. “Okay, at this point I would like to point out that I am not a relationship counsellor, but would it kill you to just have a conversation with her? Go out for coffee or lunch or whatever it is that civilians do.”

Which is how she ends up at a family-owned Italian café three days later, shredding a croissant with freshly painted fingernails, waiting for the Black Widow. Pepper’s slightly embarrassed that she’s actually shifted her schedule around to fit this meeting in, and even more embarrassed that she arrived a full half hour early. There’s punctuality and then there’s-

Natasha slides into the seat opposite Pepper. “In the interests of full disclosure, I got here twenty minutes ago, but I was watching from across the street.”

Pepper nods. “I suppose I should admit that I got here half an hour ago, then.”

A waitress comes over to the table. “Good morning, my name is Alessia, can I get you anything?”

Natasha smiles winningly at her. “Hi, yeah, can I get a regular latte, please?”

“Sure thing. And for you, ma’am?”

Pepper smiles too. “Another cappuccino, please.”

“Great. I’ll bring those over to you, then.”

As soon as the waitress leaves, the smile slips from Natasha’s face.

“It unnerves me when you do that,” Pepper admits.

Natasha’s mouth twitches into something that does not qualify as a facial expression. “Servers tend to think my default setting is a bit rude.” She settles back in her seat. “Personally, I kinda think you're being a hypocrite. You change yourself. Everyone does. I just haven’t hidden that process from you.”

“It’s not that,” Pepper says. “It’s the range of options available to you. Everyone operates within a set of parameters, so if I - oh, I don’t know, if I suddenly burst into tears in this very public place, you would think it was out of character. You - I don’t know what’s in character for you. You don’t seem to have limits in the same way.”

Natasha doesn’t react at all to this, just keeps watching Pepper. “And that’s why you don’t trust me.”

“Well. That, and the way every interaction with you feels like you’re manipulating me in some way.”

“Your coffees, ladies.”

Pepper and Natasha both turn to smile at Alessia. “Thank you,” Natasha says for both of them.

“No worries!” She beams at them and bustles off to serve another table.

“And we weren’t both just manipulating her?” Natasha asks Pepper, sotto voce.

Pepper sighs, picking up her cappuccino. “This isn’t working, is it?”

"No," Natasha smirks. "Could've told you that." She runs a finger round the rim of her latte and licks off the foam.

“How?” Pepper asks. “Because you know me that well?”

“Because I know people. Half of infiltration isn’t changing yourself, it’s reading other people. Predicting, not assuming. Analysing, not concluding. Always working on the behaviour presented. You learn not to believe in the fantasy of people having different personas - the trick is to integrate everything you see into one picture. And you learn what people have in common.”

She takes a leisurely sip of her coffee.

“I’ll bite,” says Pepper. “What do people have in common?”

“Not much,” says Natasha. “And it’s all tendencies rather than absolute rules. But if I’m put in a situation where I need to build links as quickly as possible, then I’ll fall back on the principle that people like people who are similar enough to be non-threatening, and different enough to be intriguing.”

“I didn’t find you - Natalie - intriguing,” Pepper says.

Natasha tilts her head. “You weren’t my target. That was Stark. All I needed from you was for you not to get suspicious. So, I made Natalie perfectly competent, just a little bit better at her job than you needed her to be, and then gave you a reason to dismiss her entirely. If Stark had been seducing me, you’d have felt sorry for me, bonded with me against him, and that’s not what I needed. If I was the one seducing him, you would think I was one of those women who sleep their way to the top, and you would dismiss me. So, similar enough to be non-threatening, different in a bad way.”

“So what did you present to Tony?” asks Pepper.

Natasha takes another sip of coffee. And then another. Then, slowly, she puts the cup down. “I think you know.”

Pepper feels something in her freeze. “That’s not fair,” she says lightly. “You have been telling me to ask, rather than to presume.”

“I know.”

But still she says nothing more.

“Natasha,” says Pepper. It’s the first time she’s called her by that name. “If you don’t want to tell me, you can just say that.”

Natasha nods.

“The point is that you don’t like me because you have no idea how I’m similar to you, and me telling you how different I am doesn’t help.” She looks intently at Pepper. “Spend time with me. With all of us.”

“Why?” Pepper asks. “Why do you care?”

“Because I know the ways in which we’re similar,” she says. From her pocket, she draws out a handful of coins and puts them on the table - the exact change for her coffee. “We do movie nights on Thursdays, catastrophe permitting,” she says. “Come by some time.”


	2. non semper erit aestas

Pepper doesn’t turn up to the next two movie nights, but Natasha is unconcerned. She’ll come eventually, and perhaps spending more time with her will work better than giving her space.

Clint moves back home, this time without her. She thinks that’s probably a good thing. It had been nice, being with Laura and the kids immediately after the battle, helping round the house and the farm in ways that felt constructive, productive, while Clint took some time to gently fall apart in a way that let him come back together stronger. He needed her then, they all did, but now it’s time for family. Natasha recognises that, and stays in New York.

She wonders if Clint counts as the second or the third to leave, if Thor took first position from Pepper when he left with Loki. He never lived here though.

In the meantime, the rest of the team make their way through the last of the Harry Potter movies. Natasha quite enjoys movie nights as a way to watch the others - she’s seen most culturally important movies just in case a cover identity should need the knowledge, so the films are never new to her, but she learns a lot about her teammates. As they get absorbed by the action, they forget themselves. Stark is constantly moving, fidgeting, unable to keep his attention on the screen. Bruce holds himself back, always detached, and sits on an armchair rather than risking someone sitting next to him. As for Steve, once he’s gotten over special effects and culture shocks and so on, he’s like Natasha. He keeps glancing at his teammates, checking on them, reaching out to them where he can. Sometimes, they catch each other looking, and Steve smiles, embarrassed.

Natasha has settled into a group like this before, when Clint first brought her into SHIELD. It’s easier by far this time. This time, no one is waiting for her to kill them, and they’re all new to each other. If anything, she has the advantage, because at least she has Clint, when he’s here. Really, she thinks she could be quite comfortable here for a good few years, but Natasha doesn’t think in hypotheticals. She works from observations, from practicalities, and she makes the best of where she finds herself. She’ll see what happens.

The first day that Pepper does turn up, it’s the day that Natasha talks the rest of them into watching _Mean Girls_.

“It’s important,” she argues when Tony, predictably, complains. “It’s a cult classic, it’s quoted all the time by young people -”

“You had to watch this for a mission, didn’t you?” he asks.

“The mark had a younger sister,” she confirms, pouring herself some tea. “But if the whole point of this is to get Steve up to speed on modern American culture, then this is an important movie for him to watch.”

“For American teen girl culture, sure,” Tony says.

“American teen girls have a habit of growing into American women,” Pepper points out from the doorway. “I’m not hearing you dismiss half the population again am I, Tony?”

Natasha smirks down at her tea strainer.

“Of course not, Pepper, light of my life, arbiter of the R&D budget,” says Tony.

Bruce, who has been following this exchange with shrewd eyes, speaks up. "Well, I’ve never seen it. Will you be joining us, Pepper?"

"I will, as it happens," she says. She steps into the room properly and does an admirable job of pretending she knows where to sit, striding to the couch. Steve is already in place at its other end; a good tactical choice, Natasha thinks approvingly. Pepper's clearly aiming to avoid awkward silences by explaining modern references to him.

Tony plonks himself onto the other couch, seemingly unconcerned about being deprived of the person most likely to put up with him barging into their space, and Bruce is in his customary armchair. Natasha could fit onto either one of the couches or take the one remaining chair but, on a whim, decides instead to sit on the floor, almost leaning against Steve's leg. That puts her near Pepper, but not on her level, and easily within her eyeline.

As for Natasha, though, she has a good view of Bruce, and no one else. She would have to turn her head noticeably to look over at Tony, and of course she’s placed Steve and Pepper directly behind her.

She sits back, curled around her cup of tea, and watches the movie.

~

Their fourth team battle. It should have been a milk run, clearing up a bunch of badly-programmed drones which got loose from an army base - some general or other was going to come badly out of this. But the drones were firing bolts of energy wildly, unpredictable, and the sheer number of them made them deadly. Stark was exhilarated, flying high above the drones and picking them off along with Clint, who wasn’t as well covered as Natasha would have liked. And Cap was running out into the thick of it, tagging along with Hulk, who was getting more and more irritated with every hit, and Natasha was sure this wasn’t going to end well.

In the end, she was the close call. Half her hair was singed clear off, and she only escaped burns because she smothered her own head under a jacket she nabbed from a reporter getting too close to the action. Her throat is sore and her voice rasping from the smoke. They’ve all been subdued and quiet through showering and debriefing at SHIELD HQ but now, back at the Tower, Cap is finally making his displeasure clear.

“I don’t expect to be calling you out on this,” he tells Natasha. “You’re a trained operative.”

“A trained solo operative,” she points out dryly.

“I’m getting popcorn. Does anyone else want popcorn?” Stark pipes up. Steve and Natasha both ignore him.

“Nevertheless, I refuse to believe that you’re unaware of how a unit is supposed to operate,” he says, and Natasha notes the little compliment hidden in there. Of course Steve would be the sort of commander to make his troops expect more of themselves. She knows how to respond to that.

“I’ll do better,” she says, but he only raises an eyebrow.

“You’ll do better at what?” he asks. “What was the problem?”

She presses down the instinct that would have her eyes narrowing. “I was thinking too much like a solo operative.”

He shakes his head. “No, you weren’t. You were perfectly aware of the rest of the team.”

“Yeah, speaking of us, let’s go start on dinner,” Clint says loudly.

Respectfully, Steve waits until they’ve gone to resume. Natasha can still hear Stark pouting.

“If anything, you’re too aware of us,” Steve says. “Your focus is always on us, particularly me and Clint, am I right?”

“So I want to have your back, what’s the problem with that?” she asks.

“The problem is that today having our backs wasn’t supposed to be your primary focus,” Steve says. “Tony had eyes on Clint, and I was with Hulk.”

“I didn’t get the feeling he was really focused on having your six,” she says, keeping it light.

Steve waits, but it’s the oldest trick in the book and Natasha doesn’t fall for it. She stares at him in determined silence until he finally relents.

“That’s your problem,” he says. “You don’t trust the rest of us to do our jobs.”

She could argue, she supposes, or else she could admit to the fault and promise to work on it, as she tried earlier, but having used the tactic already she doubts it would be believed. Instead, she waits for Steve to give her a cue.

“Natasha,” he says softly. “I don’t know your history. I don’t know how hard it is for you to trust me, or the others.”

Sympathy - she can play on that - but he presses on.

“I want an honest answer now - do you think we would work better if you were team leader?”

“No,” she says immediately. “You’re a far better team tactician than me, and everyone will listen to you, no questions asked. Clint would take my direction, but who knows about the Hulk, and Stark -”

“He might surprise you,” Steve says lightly.

“He doesn’t listen to anyone except Pepper,” Natasha counters. “If he won’t follow your orders consistently, he’d never follow mine.”

Steve concedes the point with a rueful smile. “Alright. So, work with me, how can we set things up so you’re not worrying about people?”

She frowns. “You want to change the way the whole team is coordinated to accommodate me.”

“Well, so long as it’s not to anyone else’s detriment,” he shrugs.

He’s serious. Well, of course he is.

“You can’t pair me with Clint,” she says. “We work literally at different levels.”

“Is there anyone you trust to have his back?” he asks.

She shrugs.

“Alright. How about me? Actually, why me? I’m a little harder to kill than most guys.”

The real answer has more to do with his attempt at a watery suicide than she’ll say aloud. “Not as hard as Thor or Hulk. And Stark has the manoeuvrability.”

“Okay, so if possible, you and me can stick together. Will that help?”

“You know this feels a little patronising,” she says. “You shouldn’t have to do this.”

“Sorry,” he says. “I don’t mean to talk down to you.”

But that’s not the problem, or not quite. In the past, she’s had handlers who would ignore her preferences, or assume she was comfortable with everything. She told that to Fury, once, soon after Clint brought her in.

“What am I supposed to do with you?” he’d asked.

She shrugged. “Whatever you want.”

The director fixed her with that fierce stare. “So you’ve got no limits. No boundaries, no preferences.”

Of course she said no. She wasn’t about to give anything up to the director of the organisation holding her hostage.

“Really, nothing,” he said.

She had considered quickly. “I suppose I prefer to work alone. Babysitting isn’t a productive use of my time.”

It was too obviously a ploy for a degree of freedom. For the first two years, she had been assigned only on group missions, and then only on joint missions with Clint and Coulson for a further three. By the end of that five years, she’d found that she preferred not to work alone any more, and spared herself a moment of self-hatred, that she had allowed herself to be trained out of the only preference she’d ever shown.

Still, that was the year that Clint had taken her home to his family for the first time.

“I’m not used to people catering to me,” she tells Steve. “It’s not necessary.”

“Then explain this,” he says, gesturing to her head.

“It shouldn’t be necessary,” she amends, with a carefully rueful smile.

Suddenly, fiercely, she hates Steve Rogers. Hates him for trying to make her into something she’s not, something soft, something with priorities beyond mission parameters.

“But alright,” she says calmly. “And I will work on it.”

He claps her on the shoulder in a way that suggests he’d be saying ‘good man!’ to anyone else on the team.

“Let me know how it goes,” he says. “In the meantime, five bucks says the others just called for takeout.”

She lets her anger go and quirks an eyebrow. “Ten says it’s Thai.”

He narrows his eyes at her. “How d’you know?”

“Reasonable guess based on past behaviour,” she says. It’s her favourite, and Clint’s feeling sorry for her. She doesn’t offer that information to Steve though. No need to do that right now.

He shakes his head, smiling. “Always a pleasure losing money to you, Ms Romanoff.”

She doesn’t point out that he’s never actually lost money to her before.

Clint has indeed ordered Thai, but Natasha still has a chance to be surprised because Pepper is there. She’s dressed in leggings and an oversized jumper - possibly ill or menstruating, Natasha thinks. Even when Pepper was living here she never saw her dressed like -

Ah, no, of course. This is Pepper making an effort. Pepper is most comfortable in formalwear, in subtle designer labels, in skirts that force her to tuck one ankle behind the other and blouses with lines which would be ruined if she slouched. This casualness is a deliberate and distinctive effort, just as her classy everyday outfits would be a distinctive effort for Natasha.

Steve starts at seeing her, too. “Oh, Miss -”

Three voices interrupt him at once: “Pepper!”

He holds up his hands. “Sorry, sorry. Hi, Pepper.”

“Hi Steve, Natasha,” she says. “Are you both alright?”

Steve glances at Natasha, who gestures to her head. “Fine, if you know a good stylist for pixie cuts.”

Clint barks out a laugh. “Hey, reckon pixies actually exist on one of those realms Thor talked about? Could have been they visited and gave us the inspiration for all the fairy tales and shit.”

“They haven’t,” says Tony through a mouthful of noodles.

Clint scoffs. “Maybe they have. How would you know?”

The argument about religion and myth starts up again. It’s a common bone of contention between Clint and Tony; Clint may not believe, precisely, but he has a healthy respect for faith, whereas Tony has faith in nothing but believes wholeheartedly in physics. Clint enjoys baiting that belief whenever possible.

Pepper brings over a plate of rice to Natasha. “Come and get some food before Steve eats it all.”

Steve has indeed used the cover of the debate to help himself liberally to the takeout containers scattered across the table. He smiles sheepishly at Pepper, but still grabs a couple of chicken satay skewers to top off his mound of food.

“Sorry,” he says.

His genuine embarrassment makes Pepper retreat back into a polite smile, so Natasha elbows him, completely ineffectually. “Shut up and eat your curry.”

Steve laughs. “Yes ma’am.”

Natasha helps herself to a fragrant fish curry, and then some pad thai on the side because she needs the calories after that fight.

Bruce comes up to her side. “How’s your throat?”

She shrugs. “I had a lozenge. Could be worse.”

He nods, accepting that.

It’s all very convivial. Clint is now gesticulating with his fork in a rather violent manner as Tony argues back through a mouthful of noodles. Steve is watching them fondly, and Bruce has retreated to a corner with his food, looking half as if he’ll fall asleep on his plate.

“You’re here overnight?” Natasha asks Pepper.

Pepper smiles. “Tony’s already made the requisite sleepover jokes.”

Natasha rolls her eyes. “Of course.”

“I’m heading out again tomorrow too,” Clint points out, breaking away from Tony’s diatribe on fortune-telling. “Slumber party at Superhero HQ.”

That gets a dainty laugh from Pepper. “It’s a shame you can’t stick around, Clint,” she says.

He waves a hand. “You know how it is.”

Natasha suppresses a smirk. Clint can do undercover when he has to, but only when he’s playing a completely different role. He’s never been good at simply lying.

He catches Natasha before leaving. “You sure you can’t come with?” he asks. “You know it’s Lila’s birthday coming up.”

“And I mailed her present two days ago,” Natasha says. “Fury wants me here.”

Clint’s nose wrinkles, but he doesn’t argue. “Alright then. I’ll see you soon.”

Natasha nods, the closest she can come to promising. He walks away without saying goodbye.

~

To Natasha’s amusement, Pepper sends her a recommendation for a hair stylist the next day, to her SHIELD email address no less, and mentions that she’s been meaning to go for a manicure recently. Natasha won’t turn down an invitation like that; they each book a session on Saturday morning at ten, to which Natasha arrives only ten minutes early.

She steps into the salon just as it hits ten. Pepper is sitting on the couch by the reception desk, flicking through one of the classier women’s magazines, but she looks up as the door opens and smiles.

“Morning,” she says.

Natasha smiles in return. “How are you?”

“Well, thank you,” she says. “You?”

“I’m good,” says Natasha. “Looking forward to getting this mess sorted out.” She turns to the young woman behind the reception desk. “Natasha Romanoff, here for a restyle.”

The woman looks at her head, and her eyes light up under a thin veneer of professionalism. “Going for something radical?” she asks.

Natasha twists a bit of burnt and broken hair off with ease. “I think I probably need to.”

“Great. I’m Evanni, I’ll be styling your hair today. Shall we go through? Miss Potts, if you’d like to come through too, Kendra will be out in just a second.”

It’s easy to see why Pepper favours this place. They’re taken through into a discreet back room with no street-facing windows, but such good lighting that it almost doesn’t seem artificial. The decor is light and modern in a faux-rustic sort of way, as if they’re supposed to believe that a seafront cabin had been transplanted into Manhattan and made as chic as the neighbourhood. Natasha congratulates herself on having checked their prices before booking the appointment.

“Right, we’ll get rid of the damage first and then see what we’ve got to work with,” Evanni says decisively. “You just sit back and relax.”

She doesn’t relax, of course, not with a woman with sharp scissors at her back, but she pretends to. Pepper has settled back at what Natasha would ordinarily call the nail counter, but the products are all hidden away in bleached white wooden cabinets along the walls, so it really resembles nothing so much as a long, thin table. She knows that Pepper will be watching her, so Natasha keeps an eye on her in return. It’s her best early warning system if Evanni attempts something out of the sight of the mirror.

“You have taken a hell of a lot of damage here,” says Evanni, letting chunks of hair flutter to the floor.

“I was kind of on fire for a minute,” Natasha points out. “I’m counting myself lucky I’m not bald.”

“Optimistic of you,” says Pepper.

Natasha raises her eyebrows. “I’m not sure there’s much optimistic about knowing that it could always have been worse.”

“There is if you’re looking at it as a positive thing in the present moment,” Pepper counters.

There’s some truth to that. Natasha lets the idea settle inside her. “Fair enough.”

An older woman who must be Kendra emerges from the back room. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Pepper,” she says, smiling with easy familiarity.

“Not to worry,” Pepper smiles back. “How’s Jake doing?”

Jake, as Natasha gathers from the following conversation, is Kendra’s son, just out of college, looking for jobs in graphic design.

“What about you, you got kids?” she asks Evanni when the talking pauses.

“God, no. Three cats. You?”

“Five superheroes.”

Pepper laughs. “Four. You can have the others.”

“Let’s just file for joint custody of all of them,” Natasha suggests.

“Now there’s a sitcom,” Kendra says.

Evanni steps back and has a look at Natasha’s head. “Right, that’s the damage gone. Let’s get this washed and decide how we’re going to make you stunning.”

She ends up with most of her head shaved to a number two, and the remaining hair on top longer but jagged, uneven. She likes it, likes the way she can ruffle it and still come out looking shabby chic. There’s not much she can actually do with it, but it lacks any particular coding for age or demographic - she could play this off as a rebellious student, a trendy twenty-something, a sharp-minded businesswoman. If she needs demure, she’ll wear a wig.

“Thank you,” she says to Evanni. “This is great.”

Evanni smiles, satisfied. “You’ll want to style it with spray wax, none of this thick gloopy stuff. Just a light spritz’ll do, leave it a little bit of flexibility but keep the sharpness.”

For some personas, sure. “Great.”

Pepper’s manicure is long finished by now. “It really suits you,” she says.

"Thanks."

Natasha checks her watch. The other women all instinctively look at their own, or towards the clock on the wall.

“Do you have something on this afternoon?” Pepper asks.

“Meeting at one,” Natasha answers with an apologetic smile.

“You don’t get weekends off?” says Evanni.

“Well, the boss doesn’t,” Natasha shrugs.

She pays without flinching, and tells Pepper she’ll see her soon. When she steps out of the salon, she allows herself a minute relaxation at being back on her home turf, the open street, and then sets off for a meeting with the boss.

~

“Agent Romanoff,”  he says in greeting, face stern, which is all Natasha needs before she smirks.

“Nick.”

Some of the tension leaves him then. He relaxes a little more in his chair, but not in a confident, swaggering manner, not the lion casually surveying his kingdom. Instead, he looks tired, just a little. Natasha isn’t sure exactly how old Nick is - she was first too cautious and then too respectful to really go hunting for his background - but he must be in his sixties by now. Closer to retirement than most of them would get.

“Any progress on Operation Frat House?” he asks.

Natasha doesn’t settle into her chair; that’s not how she relaxes. She swings her legs up beside her, but keeps her spine poker straight. “Some. Stark and Rogers still butting heads at every opportunity, but it’s teasing now. Well, sometimes. Banner’s a lot more gentle when he doesn’t feel threatened, and he’s started to socialise more. It’s just Potts who concerns me.”

Nick raises an eyebrow. “You went out for a mani/pedi together this morning.”

She doesn’t ask how he knows. She’d be more concerned if he didn’t. “Sure, she’s making the effort, but it won’t stick. She fundamentally dislikes the fact that Tony’s risking himself. Swapping hair care tips won’t suddenly make her forget that I’m-”

“-that you’re what, Natasha?”

She glares. “Part of the team with whom he risks his life.”

He drops it, which just means he’ll bring it up again some other time. “So you’re saying keeping the Avengers together isn’t feasible long term.”

Natasha hesitates. “I think it’s inevitable that we split up. Discounting Barton and Thor, Rogers is going to need something more to keep him occupied sooner or later, and that will involve him leaving. Banner will stick with Stark.”

“And you?”

That’s too pointed. She deflects. “I will stick with Stark only if there’s superglue or orders involved.”

He recognises the misstep, and retreats. “What about Potts?”

“More comfortable on the West Coast,” Natasha reports. “She’s stayed on the East after the Tower’s opening because of the European deals, but Japan is making noises about SI clean energy, so that won’t last. She’s already commuting back to California for meetings she could have attended via video.”

Nick nods, thoughtfully. “It’s a shame, I like that woman,” he says.

A subtler probe, but subtlety only means that Natasha can avoid it more easily. “And when it comes down to it, Stark will base himself around her. His guilt complex won’t let him leave Rogers and Banner alone, but as soon as Rogers shows interest in anything outside of the Avengers, his focus will be entirely on her. Banner’s too transitive to keep anyone anywhere.”

He sniffs. She really should go more on the counter-attack, but that’s not how she operates. Natasha doesn’t give out, she just takes in. Still, for the sake of keeping him on his toes:

“I heard from Melinda May that she’s back out in the field.”

He smirks. “No, you didn’t.”

She hasn’t, of course. The former Agent May is Natasha’s favourite person to go to for administrative purposes - an agent that well-trained and disciplined can’t help but be ruthlessly efficient with paperwork - but they don’t talk socially. Natasha only noticed her absence when she went to file a change of address, so naturally she went digging in the records. It’s all classified to high hell, though, so she’d thought it would at least make Fury twitch.

She laughs. “Of course not,” she says.

And there, that gets his attention. Which means he suspects a different leak. Interesting. Maybe Melinda May’s location is worth probing a little more.

Nick leans forward. “On the level, Agent Romanoff. If you get word about May’s whereabouts, I need to know about the source straight away.”

He’s serious. These talks between them are many things, but they are rarely serious.

“You need a cover story for her leaving, then,” Natasha advises. “She’s one of the best in admin. I’m not the only one who goes straight to her, and I won’t be the only one to try to work out where she’s gone.”

He nods, slow and grave, and then leans back, his lazy confidence back in force. “Stop by and see Hill on your way out, would you? She likes knowing the Avengers are where she can see them.”

Hill is one of their biggest supporters outside of Fury himself. Natasha grins. “I’ll invite her to pizza night.”

“And you wonder why I call it Operation Frat House,” Nick calls in parting.

~

Natasha has never had much of a relationship with food. She can cook, of course, but she can equally survive on protein bars or pre-prepared food. She’s not as careful with her diet as people assume she must be; she’s not a bodybuilder, to eliminate all carbohydrates, or a health nut, to eliminate all processed foods. She gets herself the calories she needs to maintain whatever weight and energy level she needs to maintain at that moment, and beyond that, she doesn’t really care.

This is a lie.

Natasha has strong opinions on fragrance and flavour. She will eat anything edible, true, but she has respect for the evocative powers of taste. She has her particular favourite blend of Sochi tea, and it pisses her off no end if she can’t get it.

Living in the tower, it’s the first time she’s really been able to cultivate more than one culinary habit. Clint is chronically unable to cook small portions of anything, and he has a way of combining whatever the hell’s in the pantry into a gorgeous pasta sauce. Between him and Steve, they’re gradually teaching each other that they can branch out a bit, maybe even buy actual ingredients. Whenever Clint’s in New York, Natasha texts sneaky pictures of him cooking to Laura, who’s been cooking for them both on and off for years. Tony can’t cook to save his life, but JARVIS has all the best take out places on speed dial.

And then there’s Bruce.

“Hey, big guy.”

He drops his spoon. It clatters into the curry he’s stirring and splashes bright sauce on his shirt. Natasha quirks a smile, but doesn’t laugh.

“Ah, Agent - I mean, Natasha - that is -”

“Natasha’s fine,” she says. “What are you making?”

He runs a cloth under the faucet to dab at his shirt. “Uh, dal,” he replies. “It’s probably terrible.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Have you tasted it?”

“Well -”

She doesn’t wait for the answer but slips round him to grab a teaspoon and taste it herself. The lentils aren’t done yet, still a little crisp between her teeth, but the spice explodes over her tongue in almost perfect balance.

“Maybe a little more cumin,” she says.

“Yes, chef,” says Bruce, and she smiles.

“Oh, sous-chef, please.” She glances round the kitchen. “Is there something I can do?”

It takes Bruce a second to remember how to delegate. “You could make a raita? I bought chutneys - well, JARVIS ordered them - but -”

“Sure,” she says easily. “Standard cucumber and mint okay?”

“Yeah, that’s great.”

They lapse into quiet after that. Bruce isn’t the most talkative of guys, and Natasha isn’t in the mood to provoke him into speaking. Given enough time and exposure, maybe he’ll get there on his own, anyway. Once she’s done with the raita, she puts together a quick salsa - not quite the right culinary tradition, but it’ll go fine with everything else, and Natasha likes having something fresh on the table. Bruce is frying onion bhajis, and there are four naans in the top oven. The whole kitchen smells like a warm, aromatic explosion.

Naturally, Steve wanders in just as Bruce is turning the cooker off.

“Hey, bottomless pit,” Natasha says in greeting.

“Don’t you start on the nicknames,” Steve warns. He pauses. “That said, please tell me you’re not just cooking for two.”

Bruce places a massive saucepan of rice on the counter. “In this house?”

“This is why they call him a genius,” Natasha faux-whispers. “Come on, help yourself.”

Steve does. “Well, Thor’s still in Asgard, Clint is wherever Clint is, and Tony’s - actually, does anyone know where Tony is?”

“If I may, Captain Rogers,” says JARVIS, “Sir is currently in Malibu, consulting with the West Coast Research and Development branch of Stark Industries.”

“And Tony’s in California, thanks JARVIS,” Steve finishes. “It’s not exactly a full house.”

“Pepper?” Natasha asks, helping herself to dal.

“Miss Potts is currently in Moscow,” JARVIS answers.

Steve shakes his head. “I feel like the world must have shrunk in the past few decades. How do you miss someone leaving the continent?”

“I was in Canberra last week,” Natasha offers.

“It’s entirely possible we’ve missed Thor travelling between realms,” Bruce adds, snagging some poppadoms. “I doubt the bifrost is limited to the continental U.S.”

Natasha considers the bhajis, and decides against. “Has anyone played you the Disney song yet? The Small World one?”

Steve waits to swallow a mouthful of curry. “Nope. Add it to the list?”

“With a note that everyone hates it,” Natasha counsels. “This is delicious, Bruce.”

Bruce smiles a little. “All thanks to my sous-chef.”

Steve glances between them. Natasha doesn’t like the glint in his eye. “Bhaji, Steve?”

“That’s what these things are called?” he asks. “Sure, thanks.”

They don’t bother moving to a table, instead sitting up at the breakfast bar. In the massive space of Tony Stark’s kitchen, it does feel a little empty, just the three of them.

“Actually, Natasha, I wanted to ask your opinion on something,” Steve says.

Natasha scoops up some dal with her naan. “Shoot.”

He takes an instant to parse that response; she can see it. “Right. I was thinking about joining SHIELD in an individual capacity. Reckon they can find a use for me?”

Ah. There we are, then. Here comes the end.

“We can definitely find a use for you,” Natasha says with certainty. “You sure you want to do that, though?”

“Pretty sure,” he says. She respects him for the hedge. “I know SHIELD’s more covert than I’m used to. But they’re never gonna put me in anything too dark, not with this mug -” he gestures at his face “- so I figure I’m not gonna meet any problems that way.”

“No, they’ll put you with Strike Team Beta or Gamma,” she says.

“Which means?”

Natasha puts down her fork. “Well, you know Clint and I make up Strike Team Delta,” she says. “We’re who you send in if you don’t want anyone to know you were there. Which doesn’t always work out, but we get the job done. Alpha’s the opposite - thirty agents, for large-scale ops where we want to send a message. Beta and Gamma are in the middle. Smaller task forces, closely knit, designed for efficiency, but not for sneaking around. Ask for Beta, if they give you a choice. They get more of the up-and-up work.”

Bruce is frowning slightly; Natasha can see it out of the corner of her eye. She knows what he’s thinking, knows that he’s judging her morality, that he’s already judged SHIELD’s. She won’t respond.

Steve just nods, thoughtfully. Not for the first time, Natasha wonders where his line is, at what point the rights of the many outstrip those of the few.

“What about you, Dr Banner?” she asks. “Any plans for the future?”

Bruce shrugs. “I’m making the best of where I find myself. I’m sure something will happen to change that at some point.”

“I can respect that,” Natasha says.

He smiles softly. “This-” he waves his hand “-has been surprisingly nice, though.”

Steve swallows some bhaji and gestures with his fork. “But you don’t have any plans? Long or short term?”

“Plans, no,” says Bruce. “Projects, a couple. I’m working on a water filtration system at the moment, if that counts. You, Agent Romanoff?”

She smiles. “I go where I’m sent and do what I’m told. The only plans I make are action plans.”

A mistake. Neither of them has a response, at least not immediately. She thinks Steve is mistrustful of her words, and she thinks Bruce is mistrustful of what her words imply.

“Also meal plans,” she adds. “Who fancies some gulab jamun?”

~

The attack on London takes everyone by surprise. Steve rails about how they should have kept an eye on Jane Foster, which makes Bruce twitch, but the fact of the matter is that Stark is in China, Natasha in Seattle, Clint at home with his family, and Steve and Bruce are refused transport by SHIELD. Natasha's surprised that Steve doesn’t just go to an airport and board a commercial plane, but perhaps it hasn’t occurred to him that he can.

She’s not surprised that Thor turns down an offer to move into Stark Tower, conveyed by Pepper via Jane. She doesn’t know the guy; he can’t surprise her either way. She is, however, disappointed.

“He’s staying with Dr Foster,” Pepper informs them all one Friday evening. She’s ostensibly here to make Tony sign off on some paperwork as majority shareholder, but the clipboard is lying on the coffee table and Tony is currently engaged in giving her a foot massage. Steve is unashamedly sketching them.

“I feel spurned,” Tony complains. “What’s wrong with my tower?”

“Location, apparently,” says Pepper. “I spoke with Dr Foster, and she’s set on staying in London. Apparently there was some particular astrophysical phenomenon in Greenwich which made the whole catastrophe possible.”

“She went full technobabble, didn’t she?” Tony asks shrewdly.

“Didn’t understand a word,” Pepper confirms. “I think I’ve had too much experience tuning you out.”

Natasha snickers, and turns a page of her novel.

“Can’t blame him,” says Steve. “He didn’t get any time with Dr Foster at all last time, did he?”

“Is time consistent between the different realms?” Bruce asks. “Given that they don’t seem to be connected by conventional notions of space.”

Tony sits up. “No. Shut up. I’m not allowed to go into outer space.”

“No, you’re not,” Pepper says, prodding his chest with her toe. He collapses dramatically back against the sofa arm and resumes massaging her foot.

There’s a bit of wildness in his eyes, Natasha thinks. It’s late-onset, but if he doesn’t get therapy, he’s going to develop PTSD sooner rather than later. Pepper will be managing that, though. She must be.

For a long time, Natasha hated Stark. He’s tactless, reckless, impulsive, and doesn’t understand cooperation. It’s rather a surprise to discover that he’s also kind, not just generous, and that he’s constitutionally incapable of holding a grudge. His anger is like everything else about him: quick. It flares up with little provocation, and it might hit the same target repeatedly, but only ever briefly.

She finds that she rather enjoys him, in any situation that isn't an emergency. Even his rudeness is amusing if she decides not to take it seriously. It just doesn't matter, and that's refreshing to her.

Still, there are times when he strikes a little too close to the nerve.

He strolls into the kitchen one morning at six. He hasn't slept, she can tell, but she'd need to probe a little to work out if it was because of nightmares or a burst of inspiration. He's still wired; that much is brutally obvious.

"Romanoff! Everyone's favourite killer for hire. No, wait, I'm seeing pink nails and a blouse, whose poor company are you infiltrating this time?"

"Not yours," she answers, taking a sip of coffee.

It's all the information he needs, but he still rolls his eyes as he heads for the coffee machine. "Whatever.”

“Excuse me sir,” JARVIS interrupts. “I have Miss Potts on the line.”

“Oh god,” says Stark, coffee mug in hand, “please tell me it’s not about something I’m supposed to have finished already.”

“Miss Potts may be able to better answer that question,” JARVIS points out.

“Fine, fine, put her on speaker. Hey Pep.”

Pepper’s voice comes through loud and clear. “Two words: budget deadline.”

Tony snaps his fingers. “Damn. When was it? I am so -”

“Tomorrow.”

“- sorry, I’ll get right - wait, did you say tomorrow?”

“Yes, I did. Now, can I suggest you go and act on that? And do remember that you have a keynote speech to be delivering in L.A. in three days.”

“Sure, sure. Hey, do I have anything coming up here anytime soon?”

“Not your PA, Tony.”

Natasha smirks behind her mug.

“JARVIS?” Tony asks.

“Your schedule is not geographically constrained for the next three weeks after your keynote speech, Avengers business permitting,” JARVIS says dutifully.

“Great, pool party in Malibu,” Tony says. “Pep, you’ll be around, right?”

“I’ll be there,” she says. Natasha can hear the smile in her voice.

“Cool. I’ll go do that - what?”

“Budget,” Pepper and JARVIS chorus.

“Right, I knew that.”

“Ciao, Tony,” says Pepper, and then she hangs up.

Tony opens his mouth in a great, cracking yawn. “Right. Budgets. And then Malibu. Cool.” It’s at this point that he seems to remember that Natasha is there. “No trashing the house while I’m gone,” he says sternly.

That doesn’t deserve a response, so she doesn’t give him one, glowering in a way that doesn’t really match the character she’ll be playing in an hour or so.

“Why are you still here, anyway?” he asks.

Self-pity, genuine curiosity or scorn? Probably the former, but still. “Are you trying to kick me out, Stark?”

“Just wondering if you don’t have anywhere else to go in the world,” he says. “Where does Barton spend all his time, anyway?”

She’s glad he’s asked; it gives her an excuse to just smirk in response.

“Whatever,” he says. “See, the other kids are leaving the nest. I’m gonna make you start paying rent.”

“No, you’re not,” she says easily. She drains the rest of her coffee and sets the mug in the dishwasher, sauntering out.

“No stabbing people!” he shouts after her.

The whole thing leaves her feeling quite out of sorts. In a way, it’s gratifying that Stark is still needling her, looking for weaknesses, because it means he hasn’t found any yet, or doesn’t believe that she has any. On the other hand, he’s managed to score a direct hit in under five minutes, which is -

In forty five minutes, Nicki Rowlinson is making her way into a particular office on Wall Street, the temp secretary whilst the usual young man is off sick. She’s a little nervous, it being her first day in a new place. She’d had a solid job for the past six years, but it all fell out from underneath her, and now she’s stranded back in the temp pool, wondering if she’ll ever find security again.

By evening, Natasha has decided that the money laundering is an entirely domestic affair; she’ll put in a request for the matter to be transferred to one of the other alphabet agencies.

~

“Hey, Grayson,” says Natasha. “Eyes on target. Eyes off Captain America’s derrière.”

To her credit, Agent Julia Grayson does not blush, but instead looks away from Steve's butt towards the door she's supposed to have eyes on.

And to his credit, Steve limits his reaction to a sigh. Natasha can see his shoulders fall just a little before he regains his proper posture.

This is what missions with Captain America are like. It'll die down soon enough; exposure to anything makes it unextraordinary, even Captain America's legacy and Steve Rogers' body. In the meantime, Natasha finds the whole thing quite amusing. She's only here to observe, nominally, and it's a pretty simple mission. There's a cult who have somehow managed to take over a disused army base upstate; it's this probationary team's job to dislodge them without any deaths. There are rumours that the aforementioned cult members have actually found some sort of alien power source which might make them a bit more difficult to deal with, but still. This doesn't need Captain America or the Black Widow.

In fact, Natasha rather suspects that that's part of the test. Will Steve do what he's told, even when the job is beneath him, and particularly when he's fighting American citizens rather than German Nazis or aliens from another realm?

"Alright," says Agent Rumlow, nominally in charge. It's a joke, when all of the agents present are more likely to follow Natasha or Steve if given half the chance, but this is a test for them too.

"No lethal force, capture and disable only. Grayson, stay put, keep an eye on our exit, tranquiliser rounds authorised. Pereira, Azzopardi, Whitcalf, back exit, contain any who try to escape that way, call straight away if you need back-up. Matthieu, Jones, keep moving round the perimeter, watch for large windows. Rogers, Sato, you're with me. Agent Romanoff, I won't presume to command you."

Natasha smirks and decides that she likes this one. "I'll go with perimeter-watching for now. And I'd like to remind all agents that I'm listening on comms for the purposes of your evaluation. Especially you, Captain Rogers."

Steve actually takes eyes off target for that, turning away from the base to measure the look in her eyes. She quirks a grin at him, and he smiles back.

“All agents, absolute quiet, do not let them know we’re coming. Let’s see if we can do this completely silently,” says Rumlow. “And on my mark.”

Comm silence is maintained perfectly, which doesn't give Natasha much to go on, so she abandons Sara Matthieu and Marcos Jones with a quick apology ten minutes into their circuiting and slips in through one of the very windows they're supposed to be checking remain closed. She’ll let them off; it was an order from a higher-ranking agent. Within another couple of minutes, she’s caught up to Steve again, standing alone just inside a room with a dozen immobilised and gagged prisoners.

“Sato with Rumlow?” she asks, leaning casually against the doorframe.

“Come in or go out,” he says. “You’re blocking the door.”

She nods approvingly. “Quiet work,” she says.

“As ordered,” he confirms. His blank face tells her that he’s very aware of what he’s being tested on.

Just then, their comms spark to life. “This is Grayson, three suspects tranq’d at main exit, over.”

“Roger,” says Rumlow. “Twelve apprehended inside the compound. Commencing final sweep of building, over.”

Natasha glances over the prisoners. Mostly white men - what a surprise - but a couple of women, and one guy who looks Latino.

"Enjoying it?" she asks Steve. "Being back in the field."

"Not the word I would have chosen," he says.

The comms activate again. "Rumlow to Romanoff, we've found the alien artifact, would appreciate a second opinion."

Natasha hadn't expected they'd actually find something. She turns her mic on. "Currently with Rogers, want him to come too?"

Rumlow doesn't hesitate - he really is good. "Affirmative. Sending Sato to relieve him."

Agent Sato arrives thirty seconds later. Her hair is mussed, but she seems otherwise uninjured. "Basement, second door on the right," she tells Natasha and Steve.

They leave the prisoners to her, and head out. Natasha lets Steve take point, and notes how gracefully and silently he can move all that bulk. Maybe she should start teaching him some other martial arts.

Rumlow has left the door open and is standing side-on just inside the room, keeping an eye on the entrance and the artifact.

"Your thoughts?" he asks.

Natasha moves to circle the thing, Steve taking the other side, neither of them moving far enough around that it's between them and the door. And it looks like...

“It’s a comptometer,” Steve says. “But dressed up.”

“Like a calculator?” Rumlow asks.

“Sure. They used to have them in some of the classier shops. They used them in the war rooms, too.”

Natasha is on Google on her phone. “Yep, we’ve got a nerd who lives in the next town over and reported a reconstructed comptometer stolen five weeks ago. Ads put up, reported to the police - nothing covert about it.”

Rumlow snorts. “Great. Waste of everyone’s time. Question the ringleader and I’ll bet he’s using it to convince the others aliens are talking to them or some bullshit.”

“Should still get a bomb disposal unit in, just in case they’ve modified it,” Steve says.

Another tick for following the rule book. Natasha smirks at his back.

“Yeah yeah,” says Rumlow. He switches channels on his comm. “HQ, this is Agent Rumlow, requesting bomb disposal to my location, over.”

But then Steve tenses, cocking his head to the side like a puppy. “Everyone out,” he says. “It’s ticking.”

“And you only just heard it?!” Natasha spits, running. Rumlow’s barking commands to Sato, telling her to start getting the prisoners out.

“You’re wearing a watch!” Steve protests.

“It’s digital!”

"I realise that n-"

The explosion, when it comes, is not all that explosive. Instead, it's more like a muted thud, followed by billowing black clouds, racing to catch up with them.

"Up, up!" Rumlow yells, but he's behind Natasha and Steve, and slower than both. Natasha knows there's nothing to be done, keeps pushing herself to the stairs, throws and holds the door open -

Steve races past with Rumlow neatly tucked under his arm.

It’s so unexpected that Natasha blinks. Rumlow’s doing a rollcall, shouting names as Steve places him gently back on the ground, but everyone’s there, including Sato and all twelve prisoners, so eventually he turns back to Steve and finishes, “and Rogers, thanks for the ride.”

Grayson has such a straight face that she’s clearly suppressing laughter. Jones isn’t bothering to suppress it. Matthieu looks shocked that such a thing has dared to happen on a planned excursion. Cute.

“We have to play with that,” Natasha says in the truck on the way back. “You know, the thing where you can pick up people and still run forty miles an hour.”

“I’m not going to be your personal warhorse,” says Steve.

Rumlow laughs. “You’re new round here,” he tells him. “Just do as Agent Romanoff says, it’ll go easier for you.”

Natasha smirks. Yes, she likes this one.

They return that evening to find Bruce has waited up, and has a bolognese sauce simmering away on the stovetop. Not just a caring gesture, Natasha thinks. This whole business of Steve joining SHIELD has him nervous.

“How was it?” he asks.

Natasha plonks herself down at the counter, deliberately casual. “He played his part wonderfully,” she says. “Perfect little tin soldier.”

Steve shakes his head fondly. “You know I’m not.”

“Emphasis on playing the part,” Natasha says. “I’m keeping my eye on you, Rogers.”

He smiles, but doesn’t laugh - he doesn’t believe she’s just teasing. Bruce relaxes though, so it’s worth it. Captain America will always be a law unto himself, only manipulable through careful presentation of issues conforming to his principles. Banner has other cares, much easier to play on. Rogers is a war horse to be wrangled, pointed in the right direction, but Banner is - well, Banner is a venomous spider. Easy to coexist with, easy to pick up and put down where you want them, but you want to shepherd them carefully, and you always want to know where they are, just in case.

A screen flashes into life on the kitchen window. “What’s this I hear about Capsicle returning to Fury’s welcoming arms?”

Stark is in the Malibu workshop, which has been remodelled since Natasha last saw it. Granted, the last time she saw it, there was a particle accelerator in the middle of it. His hair is wild, he needs a shave, and he seems to have forgotten that he has three different headsets resting on top of his head, like glasses he thinks he’s lost.

“Officially requalified today,” Steve confirms.

“Yeesh,” Stark grimaces. “That sucks. Poor you.”

“It’s what I want to do, Tony,” Steve says, patient only on the surface. Easiest way to insult Steve, denigrate service, damn.

“Don’t worry, we’ll still come to your New Year’s parties,” Natasha teases. “How’s Pepper?”

“Like you don’t know everything,” Stark grumbles.

That confirms it: he’s drunk. Bruce exchanges a worried look with her - he’s an ally in this, but before he can say anything helpful, Stark’s speaking again.

“Whatever, you can all fuck off. JARVIS, end ca-”

The screen shuts off. Natasha never wishes she weren’t quite so good at reading group dynamics, but that doesn’t stop her wishing she had been wrong.

~

Steve finds her in the gym one morning, stretching. His shoulders aren’t quite straight, and his head is just a little low. She takes one look at him and says, “Spit it out, soldier. Might be a golden watch.”

That makes him chuckle. “I’ve been talking with Agent Sitwell and, uh, I think I’m gonna be relocating.”

Natasha straightens up. “To… D.C.?”

Steve nods. “To work with the Beta team there. Rumlow's moving to head it, but he said he'd be happy to work with me. Plus, it spreads us out a bit.”

She leans over into another side stretch. “Makes sense. Stark’s still letting you touch base here, right?”

"He’s keeping the whole dang apartment ready,” Steve informs her. “Think he’s the one who’s most upset about me going, never mind that he only got back himself last night. Barton and Thor both have other places to be…”

“He’s got Banner,” Natasha points out, straightening up again. “And he spends half his time in California with Pepper. He’s not exactly being abandoned.”

“What about you?” he asks.

She shrugs. “I go where I’m told. They’ll move me eventually. It’s not really efficient, keeping me here - it’s not as if we’re getting called out every day.”

“But you’re alright with -”

Naturally, it’s at this moment that both of their phones ring.

“Apparently I spoke too soon,” she says.

Hulk loses control. Later, Tony will theorise that he saw Clint running onto the scene and physically push an already-wounded Natasha out of the path of a bullet and just failed to understand that he was doing it for Natasha’s own good. He’d only just arrived, half an hour behind everyone else; maybe Hulk just didn’t recognise him quickly enough. In the moment, it doesn’t matter; what matters is that three seconds after Clint pushes her, he’s being grabbed by a force he can’t fight and flung into the sky. Tony catches him. Natasha does not think about hypotheticals.

The rest of the fight is a mess. Steve manages to corral Hulk into calming down at least a little but that takes time, and with Clint half-conscious from the unexpected g-force of a Hulk-powered flight, the team is down to Tony and an injured Natasha. They get the job done once Steve makes it back, sure, and perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a big deal if the bullet hadn’t been from a SHIELD agent, and the fight hadn’t happened quite so near to the Calvary Hospital. The dust from Hulk’s rampage seeps into the building, the water cuts out, and twenty three people die in the twelve hours that follow the monsters’ death. They never find out what the creatures were.

Natasha gets a field dressing on site, and advice to take some co-codamol until her healing factor kicks in. Clint is taken to a different hospital, away from the battlefield, with whiplash and a dislocated shoulder. Steve goes to see Peggy, and Tony takes Bruce straight to Malibu, away from the press.

Natasha thinks she should probably go with Bruce, or with Clint, but she knows she doesn’t want to. They’re both safe and well and right now that’s all she needs from them; what she wants is to be removed from the situation, because for once this isn’t her fault. Today, she wants to go away, and she almost doesn’t feel guilty about it.

But she owes Clint, owes him more than she will ever be able to repay, so when Tony carefully ushers Bruce onto a plane, she stays behind. She sits by Clint’s bedside, doesn’t hold his hand, snaps at him whenever he makes noises about leaving, and eventually steals his cell and calls Laura for back-up. She shoves the phone at him without saying hello, which she knows is rude, but then Laura probably wants to talk to her husband, anyway.

She leaves them to talk, and when she comes back after ten minutes, it’s to find a doctor finally saying that Clint can leave. Natasha nods once, and starts to pick up his quiver.

“Hey, Tasha, are you alright?” Clint asks. But he knows her better than perhaps anyone else in the world, so he only asks once.

She turns her own phone on, ready to dial for a cab rather than face a SHIELD driver, but there’s a single text waiting for her: _Happy’s waiting for you &Clint. PP_

She never gave Pepper her number, but she already knows that Pepper doesn’t consider a small thing like that an impediment to contacting people, not with JARVIS at her beck and call.

"Come on," she says to Clint. "We have a chauffeur waiting for us."

He narrows his eyes. "Is that a joke about New York taxis or has Stark actually been thoughtful for once?"

"Pepper," she corrects.

"Ah, of course."

She leaves Clint to chat with Happy on the way back. She idly scrolls through twitter for a while, noticing the small amount of people who are genuinely panicked about her and Clint. Stark has a verified account, of course, but Natasha has never bothered to use it under her own name. It seems odd to her that these strangers care about whether she lives or dies, and supposedly not just because of how often she saves the world. She wonders whether she has a responsibility to reassure them.

She’ll think about it in the morning.

Clint is already falling asleep again. She deposits him in his own bed, with painkillers and a glass of water laid out on his bedside table, and when he conks out again, she finally lets herself move away. She goes down to the communal floor, thinking about the wall of windows, the sort of feature she would never allow in her own living space. She’s thinking that there’s no one else home tonight. She’s thinking that she can stand in the centre of a wide-open space and look out over Manhattan, and allow herself to be alone.

Pepper is sitting on a low leather couch, eyes on her tablet.

“Evening,” Natasha says.

Pepper looks up. “Natasha. Are you alright?”

Natasha can’t help it; she laughs, short and low. “And this is why I shouldn’t promise to tell the truth to people.”

“You know you have the option to say you don’t want to answer?”

She slumps onto the sofa and curls herself into a ball. “You know, I knew, I knew this wouldn’t last. We’re all different people, we were bound to move apart of our own accord, I knew that. And then today happens and it’s like…”

There’s a moment of silence. Natasha’s expecting Pepper to try to fill the gap, but she just repeats, “Like?”

Natasha considers saying nothing. “Like we started to get torn apart by something else instead.”

“I’m sorry,” says Pepper.

Natasha ignores her. “You should move back in,” she says. “None of us are here full time any more, except me. We’re the guests again. It’s your home.”

Pepper smiles politely, and Natasha knows that she’ll make that decision in her own time, without input from her.

“I need a cup of tea,” she says suddenly. She uncoils herself and walks over to the bar, which has long since gained an electric kettle.

“Can I try?” asks Pepper.

Natasha shrugs. “Sure.”

Pepper retrieves two mugs as Natasha fills the kettle, and then watches as Natasha takes out the jar of tea leaves and two metal strainers, the ones which close and form a sphere. She puts a precise half-teaspoon of tea leaves into each, and when the kettle boils, she waits twenty seconds before pouring the water over the strainers.

“Two minutes,” she says to Pepper. “Then you take the strainer out.”

“You have this down to an art, don’t you?” says Pepper.

“Or a science,” says Natasha.

They wait for half a minute before Pepper says, “So I guess you didn’t discover this particular blend of tea when you were in college.”

“Actually, I did,” Natasha corrects. “Well, not the tea. The reason I drink it. I discovered that at college.”

“I didn’t even know you’d been,” Pepper says.

She’s not asking, she’s prompting, but hasn’t Natasha promised herself to be honest? “I was impersonating a student at the Sorbonne, in Paris. I had to read Proust.”

“ _Remembrance of Things Past_?”

Of course Pepper knows her French literature. “Yes. _In Search of Lost Time._ The madeleines, dipped in lime-blossom tea.”

_No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me… Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has traveled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being?_

“What do you want to remember?” Pepper asks.

Natasha removes the strainers. “My lost time.”

The whole point of Proust’s madeleines, as Nathalie’s lecturer had told her, was that the memories were provoked involuntarily. Natasha had scoffed, and now she forces the process to work at her will. She induces _déjà vu_ in herself whenever she drinks Sochi tea, and drinks it as often as possible, whatever her cover. Natalie Rushman gave herself tea as a reward for writing papers, but Nathalie Richelieu had a tea-loving cousin, and Noemi Ruiz suffered from a throat problem which required warm drinks. It’s not the most orthodox method for checking for memory gaps, but Natasha makes it work for her.

She takes a sip of tea. It’s bitter as ever, strong and heavy on her tongue, and she lets it sit there for a moment, taking stock of her body and mind. Her hip is leaning against the counter, bone resting against granite, solid. There’s an ache in her side from her battle wound, but it’s itching in a telltale sign of healing. The air is cool against her skin, and she focuses on the contrast of temperature: the hot mug in her fingers, the faint breeze of air conditioning across her forearms. She can hear it, if she strains, along with Pepper’s breathing. Under bare feet, the concrete floor presses against the bones. She is tired, and disappointed, and full of prickly irritation.

She commits this to memory, forcefully, insistently, together with the taste of the tea. Her heart is beating in a tribrach: remember, remember, remember.

And then she lets the moment go, and falls back.

The last time she drank tea was two days ago, in the morning. She was sitting with Bruce, in the kitchen, one leg tucked under the other. She remembers the strain in her thigh, and the sensation of a soft cotton t-shirt against her stomach. There was the smell of frying bacon, and the sound of hot oil popping and crackling. Light against her eyelids; she was sitting opposite the window. Soft happiness, comfort, mischief - she’d been teasing Bruce about making such a stereotypically American breakfast.

It’s a good, strong memory. There’s none of the uncertainty that comes with brain damage or brainwashing. It can be trusted.

Natasha comes back, and swallows her sip of tea.

Pepper’s watching her, curious. She doesn’t ask, though, so Natasha doesn’t tell.

~

Steve moves out. Natasha helps him find his apartment, and tuts over his lack of personal touches.

“You’re one to talk,” he jibes, good-naturedly.

She points a finger in his face. “That is not the point.”

She touches base at the Triskelion, which is where Fury has installed himself recently. He’s got another big project on the go; it takes her twenty minutes to find out about the helicarriers. Well, SHIELD is supposed to be international; Natasha will be interested to see if this actually changes its US-centrism. She stays in the barracks for agents not based in-state and cultivates some old acquaintanceships.

There’s a quick visit from Clint - he’s been sent to Strasbourg to take out the would-be assassin of someone UN-related, and since he’s already on the move, he takes the time to check in with Natasha. Even two years on, he’s not the most popular face around East Coast SHIELD, so they meet in public, sitting on the lawn with their backs to the Washington Monument.

“You sticking around here?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Considering it.”

“Go on,” he says, nudging her knee with his. “Claim you’re keeping an eye on the good Captain. He’s a decent guy to have around, anyway.”

“He says, of Captain America,” she comments.

He ignores that. “You haven’t had a proper base for ages, not counting Stark’s clubhouse.”

“And why shouldn’t we count it?” she asks.

He takes a second to consider that. “Well, because the only other person who seems to be using it as a full-time residence is Banner.”

“The Tower’s still there,” Natasha points out.

“It’s gotta feel weird without roommates, though.”

It does. It’s Stark’s tower, and Bruce’s kitchen. It’s full of the shadow of Steve, watching everyone else, and even of Pepper in slight touches to the decoration in which Tony clearly had no say. Natasha has taken over one shelf of one cupboard in each kitchen, and she has a go-bag and a wardrobe full of key items in her closet. Other than that, she hasn’t touched the place. Her investment in the Tower hasn’t been in her possessions. It hasn’t been in herself at all.

Is that why she's failed?

"I think I will stay here," she decides. "More interesting than New York. Nick's already moved here."

"Please stop referring to Fury as Nick," Clint says with a faux-shudder. "You know it freaks me out."

Natasha shoves him, and he laughs.

“Or you could always come and stay with-”

“Alright!” she says. “Vacation at your place. Beginning of next month? If I can get the time off.”

“I’ll double check with Laura,” he says. “Oh, and I don’t know if I mentioned, I’ve been redoing Lila’s room, so she’s been in yours, but she can go in with Cooper.”

“She’ll insist on sleeping downstairs like a slumber party,” Natasha predicts.

Clint smiles. “Yeah, probably.”

She does miss the kids. She should spend more time at the farm. Perhaps she would if it weren’t such a revealing thing to do.

“You come visit too,” she says. “Cap could use a friend.”

He grimaces a bit. “Cap has a habit of being photographed wherever he goes. Was bad enough convincing the neighbours that of course I wasn’t that dude from the alien invasion. Anyway, he’s got you.”

Natasha supposes that’s true. Perhaps she should start again there. It’s a shame, though, to give up on the rest of them.

~

Pepper is leaving for Malibu on the same day that Natasha leaves for D.C. It’s a coincidence, of course, and the odds of it happening were always high, given how often Pepper goes back and forth from coast to coast, but it still feels significant that they meet for the last time on the common floor with suitcases in hand.

“You’re going to D.C.?” Pepper asks.

Natasha nods. “I hear Tony’s relocating on a more full-time basis to California.”

“Yes,” Pepper smiles. “It’ll be nice to be back in the sun.”

Natasha notes Pepper’s automatic analysis of herself and Tony as a unit, and smiles. “I’m sure it will.”

She moves towards the the bar and retrieves her jar of tea and the two silver strainers. She tucks them into the top of her suitcase and zips it back up.

“It was never about you and me, was it?” Pepper asks. “Not really.”

She’s watching her with a thoughtful expression. Natasha frowns. “What do you mean?”

“When you arranged a hit on my assassins. When you met me for coffee, and told me to come back to the Tower because you knew how we were similar. It was never about that, was it?”

“It was in your head,” says Natasha. “You thought of us as aliens. And in a way,” she continues, riding over Pepper’s protest, “in a way, it was about our similarities. Our commonalities.”

“This whole thing,” says Pepper, in disbelief. “You were trying to make friends.”

Presumption again. Natasha doesn’t correct her.

“I’ll see you around,” she says. She moves towards the elevator.

“Natasha,” Pepper says.

Natasha looks around politely. Pepper seems to falter a little at that. “You can always come back,” she says after a brief pause.

Natasha remembers the time she had told Pepper to move back into the Tower, inviting her back into her own home, and the way that Pepper had frozen her out.

“Thank you,” she says, graciously. “I’m sure I will.”

The elevator arrives, and Natasha leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And thus, we move on to Iron Man 2.
> 
> Quotes taken from - okay, I'll be honest, I just googled for the quote, found it on Goodreads, so I don't know which translation of A la recherche du temps perdu I just quoted. Let's just give the credit to Proust.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm morpholomeg on twitter and tumblr. Feel free to say hi :)


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